260912 – Islam as Religion and Political Ideology

by Thomas Abshier | Sep 12, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Revolutionary and the Devotee

The Danny Burmawi & PragerU on Islam, Israel, and the West

Fellowship Discussion Essay | 12 September 2026

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. — Romans 8:15

Occasion. On July 7, 2026, PragerU published Episode 39 of The Jeremy Boreing Show, a long conversation between Boreing and Danny Burmawi titled “A Former Muslim Exposes Lies About Islam.” Burmawi was born in Jordan, lived his first nineteen years as a Muslim, spent a year as a zealous defender of the faith, left it after reading its own sources, became a Christian, lived fifteen years in Lebanon, and now leads the Ideological Defense Institute and has written Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis. The 2-hour interview was worth my time. It is a compact, well-structured case that Islam is not a religion among religions but a civilizational order that contains a religion—and he makes that case from the inside, as a man who paid for his knowledge by living the life and learning from it. You can watch it at https://www.prageru.com/videos/a-former-muslim-exposes-lies-about-islam-or-ep-39.

This essay is long because I address each major idea in the recording. The interview features Burmawi and PragerU, and I will paraphrase rather than reproduce it, quoting him once. I agree with most of the ideas and programs Burmawi proposes. I would be more aggressive in transforming American culture and the Western church. I think transforming the accepted assumptions about what Islam is, realizing that it is a religion intertwined with a political system that is incompatible with our Constitutional Republic, is the foundation. The examination touches current events and public controversy — Tucker Carlson, Zohran Mamdani, Canadian Islamophobia legislation, and Israel. We examine doctrine — grace, sanctification, the sanctification of Muhammad, the nature of the Islamic Jesus, dispensationalism and its critics. We confront practical, theological, ontological, and relational implications.

The order of the ideas confronted below is mine, not the interview’s.

I. Triage: What the Interview Asserts and What We May Assert After It

Burmawi spoke for almost 2 hours without notes, and he made a few factual errors. I shall point those out first. Proverbs 18:17 tells us what to do about it: He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him. The following are points that may be contested in Burmawi’s story.

Tier one — public and verifiable. The Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries took the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain from a Christian world; Aramaic, the language of Jesus, gave way to Arabic across the region over the following centuries; Jerash, Burmawi’s home city, was a city of the Decapolis and is today a ruin visited by tourists. The Ottoman devşirme — the levy of Christian boys for conversion and service — is documented history. Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was a church for nine centuries, a mosque for five, a museum for eighty-six years, and has been a mosque again since 2020, with its Christian mosaics curtained during prayers. Jordanian shari’a courts have, in documented cases, treated conversion from Islam as apostasy with civil consequences: marriage annulled, custody lost, inheritance forfeited. The statue of Christ in Fuheis, Jordan’s Christian-majority town, was erected by the local youth club in January 2023 and removed by the municipality the next day after a social-media outcry, and relocated to a Christian cemetery; the Jordanian King visited the town weeks later to affirm coexistence. Zohran Mamdani is mayor of New York; his father Mahmood Mamdani wrote Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004). John Calvin approved Servetus’s execution in 1553. The Aisha tradition Burmawi cites is in Sahih al-Bukhari, and it says what he says it says: she remarked that his Lord seemed to hasten to fulfill his wishes. The hadith about expelling Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula is in Sahih Muslim. The account of Jesus asking a companion to be substituted for him at the crucifixion appears in classical commentaries on Qur’an 4:157—al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir—not in the Qur’an itself, which says only that “it was made to appear so to them.” Increase Mather’s The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation (1669) argued for a future national conversion of the Jews, two centuries before Darby.

Tier two — informed interpretation. The reading of Qur’an 9:29 as an unbounded command, the three-stage pattern of Islamic expansion, the claim that Islamic soteriology is structurally fear-based, the argument that Islam is a total order rather than a religion, the analysis of the red-green alliance, the characterization of Mamdani’s commitments, the assessment that the West’s post-9/11 accommodation accelerated Islamic growth. These are arguments, and I will argue them.

Tier three — held loosely. Four items need correction or caution.

First, Burmawi paraphrases Qur’an 9:29 as a command to kill unbelievers until they pay the jizya. The verb in 9:29 is qātilū — fight — not uqtulū — kill; the verse reads, in the standard translations, fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day, and do not hold as forbidden what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, and do not acknowledge the religion of truth, from among the People of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued. The verse that says kill is Qur’an 9:5, and it is addressed to the polytheists, not the People of the Book. A command to make war on Christians and Jews until they submit to a humiliating tax is the more accurate reading, and it is the reading that has governed Islamic jurisprudence on the dhimma for thirteen centuries.

Second, the cat-and-dog example is garbled. The traditions in Bukhari say that a woman was punished for confining a cat until it starved, and that a prostitute was forgiven for giving water to a thirsty dog; a separate tradition says that keeping a dog other than for hunting or guarding diminishes one’s reward daily. Burmawi reverses the animals and inflates the penalties. More important, the actual traditions do not support his point that Islamic merit is random and chaotic — they read as ordinary moral teaching about cruelty and mercy toward animals. His broader argument that the only clear trajectory to assurance is martyrdom rests on other ground. This example should be retired.

Third, the casualty figures — eighty-six million dead in India, a possible total of three hundred eighty million across the history of Islamic conquest — are from a contested literature (K. S. Lal’s demographic estimates for India; Bill Warner’s aggregate). They are not fabrications; they are upper-bound reconstructions. The conquest was vast and murderous by any accounting.

Fourth, the Qatar-owned fatwa website story — a Muslim asking whether he may submit to sodomy to accommodate a bomb — is widely circulated. I could not verify this story. I could not confirm reports that Tucker Carlson bought a home in Qatar. He did say he was going to buy a home in December 2025, but I could not verify whether he completed the purchase. Nothing in this essay depends on either.

Two additional items to qualify: Burmawi says there have been sixty-five thousand Islamic terror attacks in recent decades; the database (through Dr. Gad Saad) counted about forty-nine thousand since September 2001. The exact number isn’t significant, since they’re the same order of magnitude. And the anecdote in which Pascal, asked by the king for evidence of God, answers that the Jews are the evidence: the anecdote is apocryphal in that form (it circulates attached to several names), but the substance is authentically Pascal — the Pensées devote extended sections to the survival of the Jewish people as a standing proof of Providence. The IDI essay Burmawi commends should be read as a meditation on Pascal’s actual argument, not as a transcript of a conversation.

Having given my opinion of what I believe were errors, let us examine Burmawi’s ideas.

II. Fourteen Centuries and the Curtained Mosaics

Burmawi opens with history because Tucker Carlson and his guests have, he says, treated the phrase Islamic jihad as a manufactured narrative — something invented by people with an agenda — and he answers with fourteen centuries. Two-thirds of the ancient Christian world occupied. Languages replaced. Civilizations reduced to ruins that only tourists visit. The dhimma. The devşirme. Churches turned into mosques, of which Hagia Sophia is the last great one, where he stood under the ceiling and saw the Virgin and the apostles curtained off because one cannot pray in a mosque with Christian icons visible, yet they cannot be destroyed because the world’s heritage authorities forbid it — so the past is there, erased, under curtains, and the present is Islam praying beneath it.

The mosaics are under curtains, not chiseled off. That is the West’s exact condition today. Our Christian past is not destroyed; it is covered. The law, the universities, the hospitals, the imago Dei that Burmawi correctly names as the foundation of the human-rights declarations that even non-Christian nations sign — all of it is still on the ceiling. We simply do not look up. And a different worship has moved into the room beneath it.

A scripture belongs here. The seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 were in what is now Turkey. Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea — every one of them is today in a Muslim-majority nation, and the Lord’s word to the first of them was: Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent (Revelation 2:5). The candlesticks of Asia Minor were removed. Not by Islam’s strength alone; Islam was the instrument. They were removed because the churches did not do the first works. Burmawi’s history lesson is true, and the Christian reading of it is harder than the civilizational one: conquest does not happen to a church that is on fire. It happens to a church that has become a museum of its own past — mosaics on the ceiling, curtains beneath.

III. The Revelation of Convenience

Burmawi’s testimony centers on text. He became devout in 2006 to defend Muhammad against the Danish cartoons. He describes the propaganda he was raised on — that an astronaut heard the call to prayer on the moon, that a Palestinian invented the computer and the Americans killed him for it — and the sermon by a Kuwaiti imam that moved him to tears, recounting how the Companions tore a poetess in half between two camels for mocking the Prophet. He read the Qur’an, the Sira, and the Hadith not to test Islam but to master it. And what he found was that whenever Muhammad needed something, Gabriel arrived with a revelation to provide it — a settlement of a quarrel with a wife, permission to marry his adopted son’s former wife by the expedient of abolishing adoption. And he found that Aisha had noticed it first, and said so, and that her remark is preserved in the most authoritative collection Islam possesses.

The Torah gives a test for prophets: When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him (Deuteronomy 18:22). That is the falsification test, that it is Popper in the Pentateuch. But the biblical record supplies a second, subtler test, never stated as a rule and everywhere present as a pattern: genuine revelation of God rebukes the man who receives it. Nathan walks into David’s court and says Thou art the man (2 Samuel 12:7), and the king, who could have had him killed, writes Psalm 51 instead. Peter, the rock, denies the Lord three times, and the Gospels, his own church’s preserved record, record every denial. Paul writes that when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed (Galatians 2:11), and the church canonized the letter. Moses is barred from the land. Jonah sulks. The prophets are, almost without exception, men whom the Word crushes before it uses. A revelation that arrives only to gratify its recipient, that never once tells him he is wrong, that adjusts the moral law of the universe to resolve his domestic difficulties — that is not the signature of the God of Israel. It is the signature of a man.

Burmawi’s friend saw it, and Burmawi saw it, and Aisha saw it fourteen centuries ago. The test does not require hostility to Islam. It requires only reading Islam’s own books with the question the Torah taught the world to ask.

IV. The Judge, the Shahada, and What a Religious Test Is

Burmawi tells of his Jordanian friend who converted, was sued by his father for apostasy, was jailed, lost his wife and children and civil standing, and was offered a way out by a humane judge: recite the shahada, say the words, and everything is restored; the state does not care about your heart. The friend, broken, said the words. Years later his whole household became Christian. Burmawi’s verdict on the judge is exact: a decent man in spite of Islam, not because of it.

That courtroom was a religious test—the thing Article VI, Clause 3 of our Constitution forbids—enacted as the ordinary operation of law. In my April 18 essay on the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of men (https://renaissance-ministries.com/2026/04/18/the-kingdom-of-god-and-kingdoms-of-men/), I distinguished the religious test the Founders prohibited — a legal requirement that you profess something to hold office or civil standing — from testimony, the voluntary declaration of allegiance that the free-exercise clause protects and that Christ commands. The Jordanian court is the religious test in its purest form: say the creed or lose your wife. And the whole Western tradition of liberty of conscience, which the secular world imagines it invented, is in fact the Christian recognition that a creed recited to keep one’s children is not faith and cannot be, that choose you this day whom ye will serve (Joshua 24:15) presupposes the liberty to choose otherwise.

I add a pastoral word. Did the friend deny Christ? Christ said, whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven (Matthew 10:33). But the first to hear those words was Peter, and Peter denied Him, and was restored on a beach at breakfast. Matthew 10 is a summons to courage, not a sentence on the coerced. The Jordanian convert did not deny Christ; he was robbed, and the robber’s demand was a sentence in Arabic. The friend’s household is Christian today. I am not the one who will tell him he failed.

V. Islam is not Just a Religion

The points in this section are the center of Burmawi’s thesis. Burmawi’s solution to the problem of Islamic immigration is for the State Department to examine Islam’s theology on the grounds that Islam is a subverrsive Ideology which is antithetical to the existence of the Constitutional Republic. Boreing raises the obvious objection to Burmawi’s demand for a State Department program to examine Islamic theology because America has a freedom of religion and the State does not critique theologies. Burmawi answers this objection with a reframing of what Islam is: “Islam is not a religion, Islam has a religion.” His point is that Islam should not be considered to be only a religion because its beliefs, practices, and doctrines extend beyond a man’s personal relationship with God and into the domain of the State.

His analogy is that Islam is a house, and in one of its rooms is a sofa. The room with the sofa he likens to the religion that Islam has, and the political, the state-forming doctrine of Isalm is a completely different room in the house. Just as liberal democracy and communism are political Ideologies separated from Christianity and atheism, Islam has a political ideology that is separate from religious Islam. His claim is that the two aspects of Islam have been combined and the entire program, sacred/theogical/religous have  been combined with its political ideology, and by doing so have evaded scrutiny by the State Department as a subversive group that should be monitored. Burmawi makes the distinction that Islam contains an aspect of its practice/belief that is clearly religous,  including prescriptions for worship, prayer, fasting, alms, pilgrimage, creed, etc. But he notes that another aspect of Islam contains aspects which are clearly prescriptions for establishing a political, legal, military, and civilizational program whose stated end is the rule of Allah’s law over all mankind. All of islam is called a religion, but inside that definition has been smugged a program of societal-governmental overthrow to replace our Constitutional Republic with its form of governmental order.

Such a move requires us to do an etymological pause to examine the validity of making this distinction: Religio — Cicero’s derivation is relegere, to read again, to be scrupulous; Lactantius’s is religare, to bind fast. Either way, the word “religion” names a relation between the soul and the divine and the practices that express that relation. Our First Amendment protects the free exercise of that relation. It does not protect a program to replace the Constitution, even if that program of state-change gives itself the label of being a “religion.”

It could be argued that our relationship with God is not confined to prayer, fasting, and other rituals, beliefs, and doctrines about our relationship with God. And this criticism is fair, especially given my thesis that God’s relationship with man is total – there is nothing, no action, no thought, no experience, no substance, no transcation with is separated from the very essence of God. With such a universal perspective, it could be considered that every act of life should be considered sacred and under the prescription of one’s religion. And again, I heartily agree with this analysis. This means that Christianity, Islam, Judiasm, Buddhism, and Hindiuism are likewise combinations of the sacred and secular, and that the distinction between the two is functional rather than intrinsic. The implication of this universal sacred-secular unity is that every religion should be examined by the State to evaluate the level of threat that the docrine and practices of each religion are compatible with the continued existence and order of the State. If a religion has as part of its central doctrines a set of beliefs and doctrines which are intrinsically different than the established political order, and establishment of that political order is advocated within the practice of a religion, then that program should be under the scrutiny of the State. Monitoring of the political activities of  such groups is clearly a function of the State. Any group, that holds such beliefs should be monitored, and the aspect of those religions which seeks such fundamental transformation should be considered within the purview of the State’s supervisory authority.

Burmawi argued that Islam’s program to replace the Constitution is not religous activity as it is not a relation between a soul and God, and that Islam is instead a political organization and therefore should be monitored by the state. I disagree with his argument only to the extent that I believe every thought, word, and deed is intrinsically sacred. Everything we do is unavoidably a relation between soul and God. We must make the division between religious and political on other grounds. There are some thoughts, words, and deeds which are between the soul and state, and they are likewise included in the

Burmawi used the example of communism to illustrate his point: if the Party declared Marx a prophet and the Manifesto holy writ, no serious person would grant Marxism-Leninism free-exercise protection to practice the precepts of its religion, which was seizing power. He argues that Islam has within its sacred texts, and within its various sects varying degrees of state-organizing doctrine. Islam is heterogeneous in this regard, from the Sufis to the Twelvers, each which has its own political philosophy. As such, each group should be monitored by the State in its activities, even if lawful. There is not right for the state to interfere with the lawful lobbying, promotion, rallying, educating, and organizing for peaceful demonstration and campaign, but such efforts should be monitored, and the nation should be aware of the agendas and programs of the various factions and their proposed changes. The Founders wrote the Free Exercise clause into the First Amendment to prevent the state from imposing a form of worship on people. This is entirely proper given that each man is responsible for forming his soul into God’s image. It is the role of the State to judge the violations of the relationship between man and man, not between God and man. The form of worship, doctrine, and belief about the proper way to shape the soul in God’s perfect image is the responsiblity of every man, and the State should never interfere with or direct that relationship. But the state, being God’s representative to guide and direct us in our relationship with each other, ,

We must recognize that both “religion” and “Islamophobia” are being used to shield Islam from the supervision of the political portion of its program.

Religion: Free exercise of religion means the state may not forbid a man to pray, fast, teach his children his creed, build a mosque with his own money, wear what his faith prescribes, change his religion, or peacefully persuade others to change theirs.

• It does not mean that a legal system in which apostates lose their children is a protected religious practice.
• It does not mean that an organized effort to substitute the their concept of the law of a god, even by non-violent means is beyond the he land is a protected religious practice.
• It does not mean that demanding punishment for criticism of a prophet is a protected religious practice.
• It does not mean that the state must not monitor a religion’s activities, study its texts, and know the goals, methods, and ends of a movement with regard to the state. It must not interefere with non-violent and lawful activities, but it is not required to maintain ignorance of them as a protected/forbidden domain of state security. Of course, such activity can lead to abuse, and it is against overreach that this analysis is essay is written. This intersects with issues of privacy and State control. Monitoring of activity of lawful subversive activity is in the interest of the State, but the State is restricted to countering only unlawful subversive activity. Free speech is what is at issue.

Islamophobia is a word whose form, as Burmawi notes, was chosen to attach the ideology to the persons, so that criticism of Islam becomes equated with hatred of the person. To disentangle this, we must tell the truth about Islam while using the Christian standard of love. Contempt for Muslims is a violation of the Great Commandment to love neighbor as self. But, as Christians, we are under no compulsion to love an ideology or political philosophy, and we are commanded to hate evil. “Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.” (Romans 12:9) The Islamic goal is to overthrow the worship of the God of the Bible and replace that with the worship of Allah, who is another god. The program of Islam is a violation of the First Commandment. Thus, in its most benign form, criticism of Islam is the criticism of a system of ideas. Such expression is the ordinary exercise of the mind God gave us, and it is also, in this country, protected speech.

The remedy, and the objection to it. The remedy Burmawi raises is one that I have considered, and is perhaps the most contentious of his solutions. He asks the State Department to judge Islamic theology as subversive, revolutionary, and anti-constitutional. Of course, a government that judges the merits of religious principles and practices is judging a religion. The problem is that government’s judgments reflect the sentiments and biases of the bureaucrats and officials charged with State security, and as staffing changes the officials may use that policy and authority against Christianity. The religion need not be judged to be good or bad. Burmawi’s point is the Islam is an organization seeks to overthrow our Constitutional Republic and replace it with Sharia. To do so would fundamentally change the nature of the Republic, as Christianity is the foundation of the Constitutional Republic we have inherited from our Founders. Incorporating Islam into American jurisprudence, politics, and culture would be a radical departure from the Founding principles. If we allow Islam to grow within our borders by fertility, immigration, conversion, and political competition, we could see the same population and cultural shift as Europe has experienced over the last decades.***

We know that Godly cultures can change and reject God over generations and with a change in leadership. No culture is immune. Even the Israelites, who saw God’s miracles firsthand, forsook His worship and sacrificed offerings to golden calves during a few weeks of their leader’s absence (Exodus 32:1-6). With a change of administration, we risk changing from a Biblically based society to an Islamic one by bureaucratic mandate. Giving government the power to grade doctrine by executive/bureaucratic order assumes the graders will stay righteous.

Implementing the program I propose requires a mature and Godly people—a people committed to the person and principles of the God of the Bible as the foundation of the Republic. My proposal goes deeper than establishing an administrative rule or enacting legislation. I ask only that the state be willing to declare the obvious and risk being called politically incorrect for doing so. I ask the government to enforce against this revolutionary ideology the same restrictions on immigration and citizenship that would be applied to any other. I do not ask the state to judge a theology. I ask it to judge allegiance. The fact that Islam wears the clothing of a religion—prayer, prophet, book, spirit—does not mean it should be given the full protection of a religion. Islam has as much right to practice the rituals of its religion as Christians, given that we desire a nation that honors freedom of thought and conviction. But given the expansionist, nation-conquering, and people-submitting nature of Islam, and its integration of this political program with its religious beliefs, the spread of this ideology and the conversion of its people to Christianity must be of the highest priority. Within our borders, we have an ideology held by a people who give the ideology motive force. Islam has within it a conquering ideology; we must restrict the efforts of Islam, but the only safe way of doing it is by individual effort, by personal witness, by cultural acknowledgment that Islam seeks to overpower us, and that we must fill the vacuum of ideological passion with a commitment to live as Godly Christian men and women and incorporate that fiber into our daily relationships and our cultural fiber.  What Islam offers is an integrated system of lifestyle, governance, and worship. That is the kind of integration that we in Christendom must incorporate into our lives. The fact that Westerners are choosing to embrace Islam means that there is a hunger for such discipline and holistic embrace of God into our lives.

The clause, read whole. On its surface, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment appears to give every religion the right to practice, and full immunity from government interference and scrutiny. (The Establishment Clause is the other half of that sentence — it forbids a state church — and it is the free-exercise half that is invoked for the immunity.) But that interpretation is the equivalent of prooftexting: reading one verse and applying it to every situation in life. “Turn the other cheek,” applied universally and taken literally, implies that the man who rapes your wife and kills your child should be shown where the other children sleep. The Free Exercise Clause was not meant to protect the practice of a religion whose primary project is the overthrow of the Constitution and Bill of Rights and their replacement with Sharia. The First Amendment was not written to forbid the government from examining the political program and implications of a religion’s precepts.

The courts have never read it as such an immunity either, and this is where the religion-and-civilization-conquest doctrine distinction stops being my metaphor and becomes American law. In Reynolds v. United States (1878), the Supreme Court held that religious belief is absolutely protected and religious conduct is not — a man may believe what he will about plural marriage, and the law may still prosecute him for practicing it, since otherwise every citizen becomes a law unto himself. In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Court held that a neutral law of general applicability binds everyone, regardless of religious motive. Belief is untouchable. Conduct is governed by one law that applies to all.

The principle applies to both Christianity and Islam. The Muslim follows a religion with harmless (but time-consuming) practices, such as washing extensively and praying five times per day. That is a religious practice which offends no one; it must not be a crime, and the Christian who wants it restricted has forgotten what liberty of conscience cost and why his own forefathers wanted it. But if a behavior is a crime — a violation which I would not want to experience — it should be prosecuted regardless of its religious wrapping: the honor killing, the forced marriage of a daughter, the corporal punishment of the apostate, the cleric-authorized mutilation for criminal offense. If it is a valid religious practice (rituals, beliefs, doctrines about spiritual reality), it should not be a crime. The concept of religious exemption has become a staple of cultural bypass around which objectors can hide themselves. Thus, the nation must decide what is right, and if it is not right for one, then it is not right for all. This is the camel’s nose under the tent that has allowed Islam to practice corporal punishment on the apostate among us. One law under which every other law is tested is this: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-40). If an act violates that law, it is wrong for everyone, and the exemption is a fraud; if it does not, it should not have been prohibited for anyone. A foundational principle of jurisprudence is that the state should protect the apostate from the corporal punishments prescribed by religion, because American law classifies those punishments as crimes. It is the purview/juridiction of the State to prosecute crime; delegation of that right to groups leads to vigilantism, tribalism, and ultimately a divided nation. One law for all counters this, and the remedy for unjust law is legislative and jury nullification (which I addressed in another essay).

The instrument already exists. I am not asking for a new law. I am asking that an existing one be applied without an exemption.

A naturalized citizen must already take the following oath, swearing allegiance to and support of the Constitution:

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

A naturalized citizen swears to:

• Renounce allegiance to prior sovereigns or states.
• Support and defend the U.S. Constitution and laws.
• Bear true faith and allegiance to the United States.
• Perform military or national service when required by law, subject to applicable exemptions and modifications.
• Take the obligation freely and sincerely.

And federal law already bars naturalization to certain applicants — this is 8 U.S.C. § 1424. Read the section’s own heading: Prohibition upon the naturalization of persons opposed to government or law, or who favor totalitarian forms of government. Subsection (a)(1) reaches the man who advocates opposition to all organized government. Subsection (a)(2) reaches membership in or affiliation with the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party, foreign or domestic. Subsection (a)(4) reaches advocacy of overthrow by force or violence or other unconstitutional means. And subsection (a)(3) — the one that matters most for this argument — bars naturalizing anyone who advocates the doctrines of world communism or the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship. That clause contains no force-or-violence element. Congress barred the favoring of a form of government, by any means, peaceful means included. No criminal conviction is required; the advocacy alone disqualifies; the application asks the question directly; and a false answer is grounds for denial then or revocation later. A companion provision, § 1427(a), adds the affirmative requirement: the applicant must be attached to the principles of the Constitution and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.

Someone will object that the First Amendment protects the peaceful advocacy of constitutional change, and he is right — about citizens. He is wrong about the man at the gate asking for naturalization. In Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), the Supreme Court held that an unadmitted, nonresident alien has no constitutional right of entry to this country, and that when the government declines for a facially legitimate and bona fide reason to waive a statutory exclusion, the courts will not look behind that decision or weigh it against the First Amendment interests of the Americans who wanted to hear the man. The man excluded in that case was a Belgian Marxist theoretician, barred under the predecessor of the language quoted above; American scholars asserted their own right to hear him speak, and lost. The Court grounded the holding where it has always been grounded, in the Chinese Exclusion Case: the power to exclude is inherent in sovereignty itself.

Naturalization runs on the same principle. Congress holds the power under Article I; the applicant, not the government, must prove eligibility; and attachment to the Constitution’s principles is an affirmative qualification he must establish, not a suspicion the government must overcome. A requirement that would be plainly unconstitutional applied to me is entirely lawful applied to a man asking to become me. The honest counter-case is Schneiderman v. United States (1943), where the Court refused to hold that Communist Party membership by itself proved a lack of attachment. But Schneiderman was a denaturalization case: the government attempting to strip a citizenship already granted, under a standard demanding clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence. That burden runs the other direction on a first application. The distinction is the distance between stripping a citizen and admitting an applicant.

So what I am asking of the political class, the legislators, and the judiciary is not a new power. It is an admission—that the precepts of Islam include a program for establishing a form of government that these statutes already describe, and that the word religion on the outside of that program does not exempt it from a statute aimed precisely at that. To properly defend our nation against overthrow, it must first be admitted by the legislators and the judiciary, and given full legal acknowledgment, that the precepts of Islam are antithetical to the continued existence of the Constitutional Republic.

The misnomer. We would like to separate the test of the religion from the test of loyalty to the State, but this analysis has shown that to be impossible. A system that inextricably joins religion — the transformation of heart and soul — to state — the transformation of the foundational principles of government — requires greater granularity and context in considering what it means to separate church and state, or to prohibit the state from judging a religion. We must look at the religion’s entire program. The name “religion,” laid over a practice of soul transformation inextricably tied to a program of governmental transformation, has to be put in a different category; in terms of classification, that category is subversive political movements. The constitutional argument appears clear-cut: anything that calls itself a religion—Islam being the second-largest “religion” in the world—appears to qualify as one. But that categorization, as we have seen, is a misnomer and a disguise, and it allows subversives free entry into the nation to work their plan toward the establishment of the governmental system they believe heartily will bring peace, happiness, and prosperity to all, and is thus desirable above all other systems of group organization.

The boundaries. In Section IV we heard Burmawi’s story of standing in a Jordanian courtroom with a man who was told to recite a creed, without belief, and upon doing so could get his wife and children back. That was a religious test carried out as ordinary law. If I now propose that America refuse citizenship to anyone who says they are Muslim, that is the same type of test. The man can deny it for a moment, and thereby pass through the gate. Yes, he can be prosecuted for perjury should he be arrested for violence against the system; yes, he has put himself at risk for denaturalization if he violates the bar of peaceful internal belief with sufficient violence, but he has gained entrance, and he can justify his lying about his program and allegiance by scripture that authorizes lying to advance the cause of Islam.

We have already established that all who call themselves Muslims, by their mere membership/allegiance/belief system/holding the Qur’an as their organizational document, are participating in a religion (giving numbers) which is revolutionary to the established Constitutional Republic under which we stand. That simply describes the system. It does not describe every man inside the system, but it does describe the de facto alliance which he is within. One way of framing the admission of Muslims is not what do you believe, but what do you renounce. The applicant is not asked whether he prays toward Mecca; he is asked whether he renounces allegiance to any program, however sanctified. Rather, he is asked to swear under oath that he renounces replacing the Constitution of the United States with another body of law. The penalty for violation is perjury and denaturalization. The Muslim who reads the conquest verses as seventh-century history and wants nothing but to raise his children and run his business can swear that oath honestly, and I will welcome him as a fellow citizen. But this is a weak fence, as it is possible that such a man could swear that he has no such intention, and as in the case that Burmawi related, do so merely to get into the country and be naturalized, proceed to reproduce maximally, train his children to be Muslims and follow the Qur’an, attend the Mosque and mix with other Muslims who arrived without the renunciation, and be swept into the program of Islam. The chances that they will renounce Islam’s entire program of world conquest and fulfillment of its eschatology are, in my estimation, negligible. The motivation for deception is high: the desire to gain entrance to a land of freedom and prosperity. Some will truly renounce and oppose the program of Islamic expansion and cultural replacement, but the pull of 1400 years of tradition, and the extreme cultural mandate and pressure to conform and indoctrinate the youth of each generation make their program as durable as the Jewish allegiance to the Torah, Shabat, and the Law over millennia.

A blanket ban on self-identified Muslims would be simply ineffective, as would a ban on entry by those who did not renounce the program of installing Sharia throughout the world. The problem is that the filter is a word. Words are free to speak; only conscience prevents lies. True, it would exclude the honest, but the covert, the ones whose intent is subversion, will not admit their intention, as is true of every criminal, spy, and revolutionary. Install yourself into the heart of the targeted victim/government/society and proceed with the work in secret, executing the cabal, organizing the insurgents, encouraging the faithful of the work and the hope of eventual victory in “destroying the great Satan.” Admission is obtained; the first barrier to entering the heart of the “enemy” is complete, and it costs nothing more than declining to tell the truth when asked.  A sworn renunciation may create a record of a commitment and a legal record of perjury, but it will be an ineffective gate.

Once inside, extracting the insurgent is even harder. He claims hardship, being brutally ripped from those he loves; discrimination and Islamophobia are then used as weapons against the fair-minded, forgiving Westerner/Christian, and the Islamist looks at the host, who has just allowed him in to pursue conquest, with contempt. The state may condition entry and naturalization on sworn allegiance, because admission to citizenship is a privilege the sovereign grants and may condition, but using that barrier as a tool to actually keep us free from the invader who wishes to enter and purposefully foment revolution of the Islamic kind will not be barred. The problem is the tradition and rules of American jurisprudence; once that initial barrier is breached, the legal system may impose nothing on the creed of a man who is already a citizen. The American who converts to Islam tomorrow morning keeps every right he had last night — his vote, his property, his children, his standing in court — and if any official moves against him for the conversion itself, the court will defend him with the same vigor as the Christian’s right to convert to Christianity. This is the foundation of American jurisprudence; it allows freedom of conscience, belief, and speech.  Thus the court will be of no help whatsoever in defending us against Islam at the immigration office or against the relentless indoctrination, fertility wars, and political campaigns whose stated aim from the Qur’an is domination, replacement, complete occupation of the world. That remedy will be unavailable. The battle must be done in the hearts and minds and spirit of the citizens who wish to maintain the

The strongest objection, and the answer. An opponent of the asymmetrical judgment of Christianity and Islam as candidates for immigration will now say: by your own logic, refuse the Christian too. He also holds an allegiance above the state — he says so at every baptism, and the martyrs proved it. If a higher loyalty disqualifies, the serious Christian is disqualified first.

If that were the reason for prohibition to naturalization, it would be a fair objection – but it is not. Every man holds some allegiance above the state; the atheist holds one too, even if he calls it conscience. The question is never whether a higher loyalty exists. The question is what the higher loyalty commands him to do about the civil order. Christ told His followers to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s (Matthew 22:21). The Apostle, writing under Nero, told them to be subject to the governing authorities and to pay their taxes (Romans 13:1-7). Jeremiah told the exiles to seek the peace of the city where they were carried captive. And when a crowd came to make Jesus a political king by force, He withdrew to a mountain alone (John 6:15), and He told Pilate, my kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight (John 18:36). A Kingdom that advances by the transformation of hearts in its allegiance to the Bible, one soul at a time, and by mass influence through media and education in the principles of Christianity cannot threaten the Constitution. Our republic is based on the principles of the Bible.  The principles of Christianity are the principles of the nation’s laws, culture, manners, and ethics; the loyalty of the Islamic culture is to a completely different moral/cultural/governmental system,

Islam’s higher allegiance commands loyalty to a completely different Scripture and an associated political/group/governmental structure. Islam requires replacing the civil order with a body of law based on the Qur’an, and subjecting everyone to it. The difference is not the degree of loyalty the subject owes to its scripture; it is what the loyalty is toward: the God of the Bible, or the god of the Qur’an. They are not interchangeable; their programs produce markedly different societal/economic/moral/cultural outcomes. The State has been colorblind in its perception of loyalty, and the question of whether one declares belief in the Qur’an, the Prophet, and/or Islam has not been asked – it is considered out of bounds; the assessment of the individual’s cultural loyalty has not been made out of fear of religious discrimination/Islamophobia and the Politically Correct doctrine of honoring diversity. The fact is that, regardless of the degree of one’s political aspirations for the imposition of Sharia and submission to Allah by an individual Muslim, his mere affiliation/idenfication/allegiance with Islam gives strength, by the mechanism of colony support, to the Islamic community. Activism by the Muslim is not required to strengthen the crowd. The mob/colony/group gains vitality through participation, even if only through uninterested presence. The fact of the threat and agenda of Islam is what is required. The state should be aware of it; the state should support all who oppose Islam in any expression. And in opposition, the State should give it vocal and unequivocal support to the Christian agenda and program. This has not been the case for decades, since we were told “We are not just a Christian nation” may have been the inflection point from secular indifference to our spiritual roots and the active embrace of Islam as a protected minority we now see today. While the State is an ineffective gatekeeper, an impenetrable wall against the entrance and advance of the Islamic insurgency, it must be an ally in the struggle to maintain our Christian culture, and for certain not a prosecutor of those who resist the Islamic attempt to replace our government. Article VI prohibits religious tests, but it does require declaring allegiance to the Constitution. This is where the question of loyalty should be confronted directly, since they are members of a group dedicated to overthrowing the Constitution. I care little about hurting people’s feelings on this matter. I care about loyalty to maintaining our de facto Christian Culture. We should have no qualms about rigorous challenge of those who are Islamic and hold public office.

The shield. Why haven’t people, whose job it is, said it out loud? Because a protective shield has been thrown up, and we have seen the same shield before. It was thrown up around Communism by the declaration that accusations of Communists in the State Department were the product of Joseph McCarthy’s ego and ambition, and the truth of the claim was lost inside the slander of the man — his drinking, his boisterous behavior, the controversy about a list and how many were on it. The substance was real: the Venona decrypts, published in the 1990s, confirmed extensive Soviet penetration of the wartime government. Whether or not one defends McCarthy, the mechanism is worth recognizing, because the same protective mechanism has now been applied to Islam. There is an all-purpose shield: simply call all opposition to Islam Islamophobia. The slander is meant to intimidate, to give sufficient bluster to rebut criticism so that the critic will retreat and conclude that he must be mistaken — that the practices of Islam are religious practices which should be accepted as readily as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, or the laying on of hands. But a category error is being committed. The commitment of Islam to spread throughout the entire world, overtake all societies, and place them under Sharia is not in the same category as the Hajj, facing Mecca, and the Lord’s Supper.

What has to change, and in whom? Simply passing a law or an administrative rule that those who are loyal to Islam should not be admitted as citizens is something, in that it acknowledges the non-benign nature of Islam. It speaks from the top, from leadership, that Islam is not the same as Christianity, that Sharia is not the Constitution. It gives moral courage to those who would confront the Islamic agenda; it gives courage to those who would criticize Islam that they will be defended with the full force of the government against the terrorist tactics meant to intimidate. If the name of Islam is diminished by every terror attack, that helps. By identifying the perpetrators as Islamists instead of hiding the identity of the perpetrators, that helps. The State — its administrators, its judges, its legislators — must be educated to understand that Islam has a religious aspect which cannot be separated from the political aspirations and commitments of Islam. But not only the state: the citizenry must also be educated to understand that the precepts of Islam are incompatible with the existence of the Republic, because no statute survives a people who will not enforce it. And the church has its own responsibility to teach the truth about Islam, equip believers, and welcome converts. Islam needs to be confronted with the history of the Prophet; the truth needs to be spoken boldly, as that is the language and demeanor that is given credence by the Islamic culture. Reason is important, but bold criticism of the precepts of Islam, strong and emotional defense of the gospel, and loud declarations of the difference between Jesus and Mohammed. If the truth is spoken, the Muslim will come out and renounce their faith and become Christians. They need somewhere to land. The state’s job is to strongly support those standing against Islam; test those who apply for admission to the nation as a citizen with an oath of loyalty and renunciation of their project to install Sharia; demand absolute loyalty to the Constitution; and remove from office those who violate that oath to protect and defend the Constitution by their professions of supporting the Islamic project.

This will also require a shift in Christianity’s outward face. We must admit that we are, as Christians, acting out the pattern of the Kingdom of God, and we must stop pretending that the gods are interchangeable. The God of the Bible is not a God; He is the only God, and a nation that abandons the God who grounded its liberties will not keep the liberties. We must admit to the truth of this claim, and be the instrument of this advocacy from the pulpit, the printed page, and the neighbor’s table. But it can never be forgotten at the immigration counter and in the federal job review. If a man belongs to a religion whose historical motivation is to replace and overcome Christian civilizations, the consideration of this man’s actual allegiance to the Constitution must be challenged more deeply than a yes/no or multiple-choice test. This is an essay question; this is an interview; this requires triangulation/coroberation. This is serious. To pretend that simply saying “I support the Constitution” is sufficient proof when the man professes a religion with a proven political agenda is willful ignorance, an allegiance to a Politically Correct agenda, worshipping diversity as a way of feeling virtuous. The system must have enforcement power: human eyes looking, mouths questioning, and brains evaluating whether the man is truthful. This challenges the man’s heart, mind, and commitment, because that is what is being asked of him when he declares that he has renounced allegiance to groups committed to overthrowing or replacing the Constitution. This is the time when the Constitution allows such examinations; if not, then when? At some point, it is necessary to evaluate the truthfulness of the man’s testimony. Given that this is a judicial-bureaucratic court, evidence should be gathered: testimony from coworkers, pastors/Imams, etc., that the man is reformed; he is a moderate Muslim. This is not a test of religion; this is a test of the man’s allegiance to the Constitution. He belongs to a subversive group that has a religion. The question is whether he holds to the group’s tenets of revolutionary conquest/control of new territory for his group’s rule. His group identification /memership/allegiance testifies against him. He can be asked about his membership in Islam because it is within the purview of the State Department to query if he professes to be a member of Islam. By defining Islam as a revolutionary group that has a religion attached to it, we can ask, knowing that it has a known subversive/revolutionary agenda; he can be asked, without fear of administering a religious test, whether he has renounced the group’s revolutionary agenda. As such, the man’s allegiance to Islam’s revolutionary tenets may be interrogated and evaluated. The test is not which God this man worships; rather, it is a question of his allegiance to the Constitution, not his creed or his relationship with his Creator. If the man is a member of the communist party, he should likewise be interrogated and rejected if he cannot provide sufficiently convincing testimony that he has renounced those expansionist/revolutionary commitments of communism. The question is not relevant for the Hindu, the Buddhist, the secular humanist, and the Jew, as these organizations are not subversives by any standard I have offered here.

And the disposition. There must be a change in sentiment toward Muslims. It is the same as the right attitude toward the homosexual: you love the sinner and hate the sin. You love the Muslim and hate Islam. This is a radical proposition only because we have been overtaken by an ethics virus of Political Correctness. We are called bigots, racists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and haters because we decline to embrace, promote, and give special privilege and accommodation to a particular brand of diversity. But there is only one primary law — loving God, neighbor, and self — and every additional program, whether of government or of ritual, is tested by it. When we as a people have recognized that the same law, the Great Commandment, is applicable in every costume, then we will have no problem screening immigrants for allegiance to the Constitution, and specifically requiring that those who are Islamic renounce their allegiance to the Islamic program of replacement of the Constitutional Republic.

What the gate cannot do. Now I have to say the thing that undoes half of what I have just built, because a man who states his own case and conceals its limit has not made an argument; he has made a sales pitch.

The gate is the easy part. Everything I have described stops at the moment of admission, and almost nothing that is actually happening in the West requires anyone to pass through that gate dishonestly. Children are lawful. Persuasion is lawful. Preaching is lawful. Buying property, funding schools, running candidates, organizing voters — all lawful. Petitioning under Article V to amend the Constitution is lawful; it is the Constitution’s own instruction for changing it. A people may talk itself out of its constitutional order across three generations without one crime being committed anywhere in the process, and no statute now on the books or imaginable hereafter can stop it.

We must retain the right to petition peacefully to change the Constitution of the Republic. We must retain the right to petition peacefully to change the Constitution of the Republic, as the social order must adapt to new environmental circumstances. Wrongs must be identified and codified. But a proposal to entirely overthrow, eliminate, and replace the Constitutional order with another system must be seen, known, and openly evaluated. Neither the unconscious forces of inertia nor the urgency of revolution should be the context for abandoning an old order or adopting a new one. That is, the body politic should make a conscious/deliberate and purposeful choice to radically modify the foundational societal principles. Reason and evaluation of benefit must drive a break with the past.

In the case of Islam, a sub-community attempting to change the Constitutional order must be understood, and their desired changes clearly and overtly evaluated; their motives and methods considered. If their reasons and desired ends radically change the social order to a new and undesired end, then their project should be openly opposed. We see their program of total societal transformation being initiated and the pressures of their methods applied. Elements of the same 1400-year history of overtaking nations and replacement with Sharia are already operating in America. In effect, we see a mindless golem instituting its pattern of social overthrow by a combination of occupation, breeding, and intimidation by terror. Retention of converts is enforced by shunning, beating, or executing those who leave. All who oppose their agenda are neutralized by various forms of psychological and physical violence.

The government must expose all tactics of the revolutionary agenda and openly publish the agenda and proposed solutions of revolutionary groups. This is the sunlight I referred to in the Jury Nullification essay. When people protest, their grievances should be known, and the government should facilitate, or at least completely allow, the exposure. People should know why they are protesting. There should be a “Christos Revolutionary Watch” in addition to the “Christos Conspiracy Watch”.  Many groups advocate changing the constitution, such as the abolitionists, who said the founding compact was a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. The Anabaptists, who would not swear the oath. And the apostles — because Rome was not mistaken about them. A movement announcing another King, gathering converts out of every class, declining the loyalty offering, and teaching men that the empire’s entire structure of allegiance was penultimate, is subversive by any honest imperial reckoning. These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also (Acts 17:6) was an accurate charge, not a slander. The loyalty test on which the persecutions turned is precisely the instrument I would be forging. Rome’s remedy for a peaceful movement it could not answer is not available to me, because I am the spiritual descendant of the people it was used against.

In summary, my position is: The state should control who is naturalized and who is hired for Federal positions. The statutes to do it are already written and already survive First Amendment challenge. We must be willing as a nation to stand for our tradition as a Christian nation. This does not violate the Establishment Clause; we are not prescribing a national religion; we are choosing the moral standard to which we adhere. The question of the moral standard cannot be avoided even in a secular society; standards will have a body of authors and documents that generated them. The argument that the moral standard comes from the Bible cannot be used to prohibit its use as a moral standard because it is simply a body of moral philosophy with authors. Using the moral standard associated with that religion as a societal moral standard does not equate to establishing religious membership, practice, or a profession of belief in the precepts of the relationship between God and man.

But making this profession (of the national ethic being the Biblical standard) openly and society-wide requires recalibrating our national commitment to explicitly acknowledging the source of our moral standard. Are we willing, as a nation, to profess that our moral standard is based on Biblical principles? In this regard, we have two sworn opponents: the LGBT and Secular lobbies. The LGBT community is committed to prohibiting the use of the Bible as a source of national morality, because of its explicit condemnation of non-heterosexual, uncommitted sexual relations. And the second opponent is the Politically Correct/Secular/non-Christian community, which values diversity and honoring all traditions equally/establishing no hierarchy of values of one group’s moral standard over another. Equality and equivalence of moral standards have been equated with virtue for those with the Politically Correct standard of moral hierarchy. It is with this group that accusations of Islamophobia are weaponized, hoping to neutralize opposition to their agenda by using social stigma against opponents and appealing to the sensitivity of those who are PC adherents. Thus, the statement that we are a Christian nation, that our Judeo-Christian heritage is the foundation of the national morality, while being true, is denied by some and invisible to most. We must lift this fog of unconscious awareness of our heritage and bring the nation to a fully conscious embrace of our origin. We must recognize that our survival, as a nation, depends on the culture all nations want to come to, not on our commitment to including groups committed to overthrowing our system of government. I fear that if we cannot make the proper choice, to embrace the Judeo-Christian polarity, we will find Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address rendered in the negative: a nation so constituted will not long endure.

So: the state may not test your religion, but it may test your allegiance to the Constitution. A man whose religion tells him the Constitution is a man-made law to be replaced by his religion must be opposed.

And the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact — but neither is it a suit of armor. It documents the principles which we believe are inherent to the rights of men. The Constitution was written to restrain the government, not to defend a people against themselves. It will hold exactly as long as the people looking into it are still the kind of people who wrote it. Adams told the Massachusetts militia in 1798 that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. The document was never the defense against the strategies of evil. The character of the people is the defense, and the document is the arrangement that a people of that character once made for themselves.

The issue of character is central to my proposal. The Kingdom of God advances by the transformation of hearts, not by coercion. If it is true of the Kingdom. Islam has gained a foothold in the West by immigration. Its program is one of rigid adherence to a moral code, and the West’s lack of a moral code is the vacuum that Islam is filling. The promises of Islam are a life of . seduction. persuasion, because persuasion is how allegiance actually moves, and no immigration statute was ever going to reach that. The church has not been losing a legal battle these fifty years. It has been losing a persuasive one, while assuming that the law was holding the line on its behalf. That is Hagia Sophia again. The mosaics never came down. We stopped looking up, and something else moved in underneath. A lock on the door is worth having; it is not worth much on a house where no one is living.

VI. Moderates, Reformers, and the Source

Boreing puts the decent man’s objection well: it was not our Muslim neighbors who flew the planes; it is uniquely Christian not to blame the group for an individual’s misbehavior. Burmawi says: absolutely, do not blame the Muslim for the terrorist — but understand that ideas have consequences, and if you deny that (as Marxism did, teaching that conditions make ideas rather than ideas making outcomes), you will misdiagnose the problem and react wrongly. Muslims are not the problem; Islam is. And the moderate who condemns terrorism while forbidding you to examine the text that produced the terrorist is not a neutral party. The Muslim defending Islam, or prohibiting its criticism, whatever his intentions, is shielding the source of the terrorism. The reformer who says peaceful Islam is the true Islam is telling the West that the problem is a few individuals, and so the West spends its trillions killing individuals while the source goes on producing them.

Boreing’s principle is biblical: The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father (Ezekiel 18:20). Collective guilt is pagan. But Ezekiel speaks of guilt for a sin, not diagnosis of the reason for the sin. Burmawi’s distinction holds both: the neighbor is innocent of the bomb, and the book is not.

Let me steelman the moderate Muslim. He says: You are asking me to denounce my own scripture in public in order to earn my place in your country. You do not ask that of the Catholic whose church ran the Inquisition. I do not read 9:29 as a standing command; I read it in its seventh-century context, as most of the Muslims I know do. Why is my reading not Islam?

The answer is the one this fellowship reached in the essay on the Oxford debate (the Daniel Johnson engagement): if the followers lead, the leaders will follow. The mass of Muslims determines which Islam prevails in any place and time, and in that sense the moderate’s reading is an Islam. But it is an Islam the texts do not support, and the tradition does not recognize, and the reformer’s honesty requires him to say so. As Burmawi’s friend Zuhdi Jasser says, he is reforming Islam rather than recovering it. Burmawi’s request to the moderate is perfectly fair, and it is the request I would make: if you read it in context, you are not the problem; then step aside and let me deal with the reading that is the problem. The moderate who answers that request by crying Islamophobe has told you that he is not standing on the side of reform.

And now to the distinction that Burmawi rightly calls the most dangerous thing in Islam: the sanctification of the actions of Muhammad and their transfer into every century. Burmawi, a Presbyterian, says of Calvin’s approval of Servetus’s burning: he did it, I will not justify it, I will explain the age, and I stand against killing men for their beliefs. He can say that because Calvin is not the standard. In Islam, Muhammad is the standard — al-insān al-kāmil, the perfect man, the pattern for all conduct — and so the caravan raids, the assassinations of poets, the massacre of the Banu Qurayza, the marriage to a child, cannot be wrong, and so must be justified, or contextualized, or blamed on Jewish forgers of the hadith. This is the distinction called standard versus execution. Christianity’s standard is Christ, who conquered nothing, killed no one, and told Peter to put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword (Matthew 26:52). Christianity’s execution — the Crusades, the Inquisition, Servetus, the wars of religion — can be condemned by Christians from inside Christianity, by the standard, without a single verse being abandoned. Islam’s standard is its execution. There is no higher court. That structural fact, not the body count, is why Burmawi is right that the two systems are two religions based upon the same foundation. This is why every Muslim who is a good man is a good man by a standard his own tradition did not give him. Goodness comes from the same law written on the heart that Paul says the Gentiles have by nature (Romans 2:14-15). 

VII. Sola Jihad: What Each System Does with the Debt

Boreing asks whether Islam allows for grace. Burmawi says no, and that it is by design a system in which you cannot keep the commandments — ten thousand of them, with hellfire threatened on every page (he issues a challenge: open the Qur’an at random) — so that the one thing that can save you directly is the one thing the text names: die fighting in the way of Allah. He calls it sola jihad, by deliberate analogy to sola fide. Everything else is weighed; martyrdom alone is assured. And the result, he says, is not mainly terrorism, which can be policed, but a people who live under a crushing theological guilt, terrified in prayer, incapable of the confidence that builds. He remembers weeping over the Qur’an and being afraid.

Here the fellowship’s method requires the Level 3 move: compare systems by structure, by what each does with the moral debt. Islam hopes the scale tips and offers one certain thumb on the scale: death in battle. Judaism is a covenant in which the law follows the rescue: God brought Israel out of Egypt and then gave the commandments; obedience is the response of the redeemed, not the price of redemption. Christianity is the same architecture brought to its end: God pays the debt in full, at His own cost, and the life that follows is response, not payment. Burmawi’s phrase for this is that the gospel is news, and one’s reaction to news does not change the news. That is why he refuses to tell his conversion story in churches: a dramatic testimony teaches people that the gospel is the transformation, and then a man whose transformation is undramatic thinks he has no gospel. The gospel is what God did. Our story is the ripple, not the stone.

Burmawi tells the parable of the man who swore to sell his runaway camel for two dinars if he found the camel, which he did, and regretted the vow. His wife told him to tie the camel to a cat and sell the cat for two hundred and the camel for two, but not sell one without the other; he compares the cat of progressive sanctification tied to the camel of free grace. Progressive sanctification can be a back door through which performance re-enters, and privileges are lost for failing to perform. This is like the preacher who tells the sinner not to come to the table until he has fixed himself. This is a good story, but I do not think sanctification is the cat. Paul says in one breath that we are saved by grace… through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast, and in the next breath that we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:8-10). The works are not tied to the grace as a price; they grow from it as fruit grows from a tree. This fellowship’s whole theology of the Kingdom is that God’s method is transformation — the heart changed, and the changed heart producing a changed life and a changed culture — as against Islam’s method of coercion. If sanctification were a cat tied to a camel, the Kingdom would have no way to arrive. It arrives because grace is not inert. The man at the table is unworthy, and Paul’s instruction is still let a man examine himself, and so let him eat (1 Corinthians 11:28) — not to earn the bread, but because a man who will not look at himself cannot receive it. Examination is not performance. It is honesty, and honesty is the beginning of the transformation.

Now the ontological floor, Burmawi says the relationship with God in Islam is a horror show. The Apostle John says: There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love (1 John 4:18). Why should we believe John rather than the Qur’an? Not because we prefer him. Because the nature of reality is at stake. If reality itself is constituted by God’s consciousness, and God is love, then a system whose central emotion toward God is terror is misaligned with the substance of existence. Its fruits will show the misalignment, and Burmawi describes the fruits: guilt that crushes, conformity that forbids uniqueness, a people who cannot scale or build. A system aligned with the nature of things produces what he also describes: the high-trust society, the confidence that comes from knowing one’s standing is settled, the freedom to fail and stand again. He notes that some attribute the West’s high trust to the Catholic ban on cousin marriage and the nuclear family it produced, and says he believes it is rather the spirit of the gospel. It is both, and the second explains the first: a church that believed each soul stood alone before God, unrepresented by clan, dismantled the clan. Structure follows theology. Theology, if it is true, follows reality.

VIII. The Red-Green Alliance and the Mayor of New York

Boreing asks how a movement of secular, postmodern, sexually revolutionary progressives makes common cause with a religion that executes homosexuals. Burmawi’s answer is a compact history of the left: Marxism promised the poor a revolution; in America the poor became comfortable and declined to revolt; the neo-Marxists substituted identity for class — race, sex, orientation as the new proletariat — and Islam, being non-Western, non-white, once colonized, and anti-Western by nature, checks every box. The two agree on nothing but the enemy, and they have agreed to take down the system first and settle who gets the ruins later. Boreing’s analogy is Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt against Hitler.

We have used the dual-track rule in cases where conspiracy appears. It says every pattern of aligned action should be examined as possibly an intentional conspiracy and possibly a de facto one—aligned interests producing convergent behavior without anyone coordinating—and that it often does not matter which track is operative, because the Kingdom’s response is the same. The red-green alliance is a de facto conspiracy in exactly this sense. No one needs to have signed anything. Two movements that both require the dethroning of the biblical God will find themselves marching in the same direction, and Paul has already told us who is at the head of the column: For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Ephesians 6:12). The alliance is not strange once you see that both partners serve the same principal, and that the principal does not care which of his servants inherits the wreckage.

On Mamdani, Burmawi reasons that if the mayor were a communist who merely identifies as Muslim for votes, Burmawi argues, he would push the Marxist agenda and neglect the Islamic one; but his defense of Hamas, his hostility to Israel, and his appointments say otherwise, and his daily bones thrown to the progressive coalition are the price of their letting him fight his own fight. If the mayor’s public conduct is as described — and the public record on Hamas and Israel is not in dispute — then it is reasonable to read him as sincerely both a real Muslim and a real socialist, and the more important reading is the one Burmawi implies rather than states: the sincerity does not matter to the outcome. A de facto alliance does not need sincere members. It needs them to be pointed the same way. The Kingdom response is the same on either reading: pray for the man by name, and oppose the program by name.

IX. Islamophobia Is Not Antisemitism, and Ideology Is Not Identity

Boreing raises the objection from the dissident right: there are special protections for Jews — antisemitism is singled out — so why not the same for Muslims? Burmawi’s answer has three parts, and each is correct. First, Islam is not a race, and the attempt to make it one is the door through which blasphemy law walks in. Second, no one has ever called it antisemitic to criticize the Hebrew Bible, the God of the Old Testament, or the Talmud; you may say what you like about the ideas. Antisemitism is proven by its fruits — the pogroms, the expulsions, the Holocaust — and it is hatred of a people, not of a doctrine. Third, therefore, the two words are inverted: antisemitism is hatred of Jews, not criticism of Judaism; Islamophobia, as its advocates deploy it, is criticism of Islam, not hatred of Muslims. Boreing states the inversion crisply, and Burmawi adds the George Carlin observation, which I paraphrase: when your ideology is your identity, every criticism of the idea is an assault on the self. That, he says, is precisely the condition of the Muslim, whose ontology is Islam, so that Islamophobia is, from inside, honestly experienced as an attack on the person.

I want to descend beneath this, because it is where the gospel answers the whole problem. The Christian’s identity is not his ideology. It is Christ — I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me (Galatians 2:20). Because the Christian’s standing is settled by a Person and not by a program, he can hear his church’s history criticized, his Reformers’ crimes named, his own denomination’s errors exposed, and lose nothing. He does not need us to defend Him like a big brother; He has overcome the world. That is the exact difference. A man whose worth is secured by grace can afford to be criticized. A man whose worth is secured by adherence cannot. The fury of the blasphemy laws is the fury of a system in which the self has nothing under it but the creed. And the way out is not to demand that Muslims toughen up. It is to offer them the ground the Christian stands on — the adoption, the Abba, Father — so that criticism of an idea is once again only criticism of an idea.

Two judgments follow. Islamophobia laws — Burmawi cites a Canadian demand for forty million dollars and curriculum mandates, which I have not verified but which fit a documented pattern — are blasphemy laws by another door, and the church must oppose every one of them, in Canada, in Britain, in the American states, on First Amendment grounds and on the deeper ground that a faith which cannot bear examination has confessed something about itself. And the Christian who says that Jews are protected and Muslims are not has confused a protection of persons, earned in the ashes of the twentieth century, with a demand for the protection of a program.

X. The Dissident Right, the Weaponized Christ, and the Islamic Jesus

Boreing describes the dissident right’s new line: Christians and Muslims share a common enemy in the Jews and in Israel; Muslims at least honor Jesus as a prophet, which Jews do not; the Gulf states are kinder to Christians than Israel is; and Christ is King has become the banner of the argument. Burmawi answers each.

On influence. Burmawi asks: what is the difference between Jews seeking influence in America and Muslims seeking it? Jewish influence — he names AIPAC and says its aim is stated on its website: keep Congress pro-Israel — is above the table, and the worst outcome anyone can name is more aid to Israel, which Netanyahu has lately said Israel means to wean itself from. Islamic influence, by its own thousands of recorded statements, aims to replace the Constitution with the rule of Allah. Boreing adds what Christians often miss: Judaism does not want you; it is not an evangelistic religion and makes conversion difficult; there is no vision of a Jewish America. Christianity is evangelistic — we want you to know Christ. Islam is conquering — it wants you to convert or submit. Three religions, three postures toward the neighbor’s soul, and only one of them is a threat to the neighbor’s country.

On the Islamic Jesus. This is the argument I most want the fellowship to be able to make, because it is the one the Christ is King crowd cannot answer. The claim is that Muslims honor Jesus and Jews do not, so Muslims are nearer to us. Burmawi’s answer: the Jesus of Islam is a different person. He is not divine; that Christians and Jews already disagree about, and Burmawi (rightly, in this context) sets it aside as a matter for the next life. What he will not set aside is that the Islamic Jesus is a coward — in the classical commentaries on Qur’an 4:157, Jesus, warned that the soldiers are coming, asks his companions which of them will take on his likeness and die in his place, and promises the volunteer Paradise. Burmawi notes the currency: Muhammad bought loyalty with the same promise — kill this man, and you will have rivers in Paradise. That is not the Jesus who set his face like a flint toward Jerusalem (Isaiah 50:7; Luke 9:51) and said no man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself (John 10:18). It is a Jesus recast as a Muhammad — and that is the whole method of Islam toward the Bible: Abraham was a Muslim who built the Kaaba, Moses was a Muslim, Jesus was a Muslim, every prophet is conscripted to testify for the last one. Meanwhile the Jew, as Burmawi says with real generosity, is at least not a hypocrite: he says plainly that he does not believe Jesus is the Messiah, because the Messiah he awaits will restore Israel and rebuild the Temple — which is to say, the Jew is waiting for the Second Coming and does not know it. Islam praises a Jesus who does not exist in order to deny the One who does. The Qur’an’s respect is not a bridge. It is a substitution — the same substitution it makes on the cross.

On spitting. Burmawi handles the viral videos of Orthodox Jews spitting on Christian missionaries in Jerusalem with the only thing that can handle them, which is proportion. According to the report he cites, there were about sixty incidents of harassment in 2025. He has been spat on in Times Square for preaching the gospel. Those same Jews spit on secular Jews. And the comparison being drawn is between sixty spittings in the one Middle Eastern country where a Christian may preach at the Western Wall and go home safe, and fourteen centuries of dhimma, enslavement, and slaughter, continuing this week in Nigeria and Syria. He says that he wishes the Muslims of Jordan would spit on him, if only they would let him come home to visit his family. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is growing. Christians across the Islamic world would move there if they could. I have said elsewhere that hyperbole is lying by proportion. The spitting narrative is the textbook case: a true thing, sixty incidents, told at a scale that makes it a lie. And Burmawi’s account of why Middle Eastern Christians themselves so often speak for their regimes and against Israel is as compassionate as it is damning: they were Islamized by culture, they live in a bubble, they do not know what freedom is, they do not know they are persecuted, and the ones who found out are the reason no one else tries.

On Jordan. Burmawi loves the King of his country. He describes a man whose mother is Christian, who protects Christians as far as he is able. And then he says what the King cannot say: the tyranny of public opinion sets the limits, and the King can protect Christians only as long as they behave. The Fuheis statue is the proof, and my triage above sharpened it: erected by the youth club, removed by the municipality the next day after a social-media outcry, exiled to a cemetery, and then the King visited to affirm coexistence. That is the whole condition of the dhimmi in the kindest Muslim state on earth: tolerated, protected by a decent ruler against his own people, still required to keep a statue of their Lord in the graveyard where He cannot offend the Muslim psyche. The King is a good man despite Islam.

On the weaponized King. Burmawi says that the crowd shouting Christ is King at the Jews reminds him of the crowd in John 6 that tried to seize Jesus and make Him a king — not because they loved Him but because they wanted a king against Rome — and Jesus departed again into a mountain himself alone (John 6:15). In the April essay I argued that the Kingdom of God differs from every theocracy not in content but in structure — that my kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight (John 18:36). A Christ conscripted as the banner of a faction against the Jews is a Christ made a king by force, for political reasons, by men who do not love Him. He will do what He did in Galilee. He will not be there. The slogan will be shouted over an empty throne, and the people shouting it will find they have enlisted under the same principle as the red-green alliance, whose signature is precisely that it does not care which servant carries the flag.

Burmawi’s dismissal of the Jews killed Jesus needs one verse: For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together (Acts 4:27). Herod, Pilate, the Gentiles, Israel — that is everyone. The cross was a joint venture of the whole human race, and if I want to know who killed Jesus, I need a mirror, not a map. Burmawi’s own line is that after two thousand years of Jews being persecuted on account of Jesus, he will not crucify them for a few sentences in the Talmud. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34) — that was said over the whole assembly of Acts 4:27, and it was not a suggestion to the rest of us.

XI. Darby, Scofield, Replacement, and the Olive Tree

The interview closes on the eschatological front of the same war.

The dissident-right narrative Burmawi describes runs: Christianity never believed in the restoration of Israel; John Nelson Darby invented dispensationalism in the 1830s, perhaps at Jewish instigation; the Scofield Reference Bible, funded by Jews, globalized it; and American Christian Zionism is therefore a Jewish plant. Burmawi answers with history: Puritan divines wrote of the future salvation of the Jews in the seventeenth century; Increase Mather’s book is a matter of record; Pascal’s Pensées treat the survival of the Jews as evidence for God; annotated Bibles do not shape imaginations as much as the theory requires; and the cabal-that-runs-the-world theory fails the simplest test of human nature — married couples cannot keep secrets through a divorce, and we are asked to believe a cabal has kept one for centuries without a single defector or deathbed manuscript. A conspiracy claim must be graded by its evidence, and a two-thousand-year secret with no leak sits at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Now, the precision. In the May essay on eschatology and the Christian underground (Endurance, Not Escape), I laid out at length why I reject the Darby system — the two-phase Second Coming, the pre-tribulation rapture, the Church as a parenthesis, and Israel and the Church as two separate peoples with two separate destinies. No Church Father taught it; no Reformer taught it; it is a nineteenth-century innovation, and I hold with the historic premillennial reading that Christ returns once, visibly, after the tribulation, and that the Church is the olive tree of Romans 11 into which Jew and Gentile alike are grafted by faith. I also said there that American Christian Zionism built on the two-peoples doctrine is theologically muddled.

But Burmawi is not defending Darby. He says he was once a dispensationalist and is no longer, that he holds no settled eschatology at all because the apocalyptic books are too easy to speculate from, and that he will know the sequence when it happens. What he does say is that he is not a replacement theologian — that he will not explain away God’s promises to Israel as shadows. I agree, and the reason is in the same chapter that gives me the olive tree. I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid (Romans 11:1). Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee (Romans 11:18). For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance (Romans 11:29). One can reject Darby’s two peoples and still refuse to say that God is finished with the people from whom the Messiah came; indeed Romans 11 forbids the second more sternly than it permits the first. The historic Church, for all its supersessionist theologians, kept reading Romans 11 and kept expecting the Jews’ return to their Messiah; the Puritans’ restorationism grew from the olive tree, not from Darby’s chart. And the fellowship’s support for Israel — expressed most fully in the July essay on Amir Tsarfati’s June update and the Sons of Issachar standard — rests not on a dispensational timetable but on two things that need no chart: the justice of a people’s right to exist and defend itself, and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee (Genesis 12:3), which was said to Abraham before there was a Jew or a Christian to argue about it. That is not uncritical. Israel is a state and states err, and the same essay that defended her deliberated her government’s conduct on the merits. Support is not worship. But contempt is not analysis either, and the man who has decided that God’s ancient people are simply a nation like any other — the position Burmawi attributes to one of Carlson’s guests — has decided to read Romans 11 with the pages glued.

Boreing’s closing line on prophecy deserves to be set in Scripture, because it is Scripture: God does not give prophecy so that we may know the future, but so that when the future arrives we may know that He is God. That is Isaiah — I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:9-10) — and it is Jesus in the upper room: And now I have told you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye might believe (John 14:29). The people who understood the prophets best crucified the One they prophesied. Falling in love with one’s chart of the future is the surest way to miss it when it comes. Burmawi’s agnosticism and my historic premillennialism agree on this, and it is the only part of eschatology on which I would stake a great deal.

XII. The War of Stories, and the Floor Under It

Burmawi’s frame for all of it is that the West was built on a story — covenant, human depravity, a system designed to help selfish men rise again after failure — and that another story has come to replace it, and that the danger is not the bomb but the replacement of the story, which alters everything downstream. He says Islam is leaving the Middle East, where atheism is spreading, and that Europe is the new center of jihad; he says the West apologized to the thief while holding the stolen goods, and the thief, condemned if he did not, doubled down; he says Islam won the lottery in the West after 9/11 because the accommodation that followed the accusation was worth more than a century of migration. And he says at the end that Israel is under attack not for what it does but for what it is, that the war against Israel is the vehicle for smuggling jihad into the West rebranded as liberation and resistance, that fifty years of postmodernism and relativism emptied the throne of the biblical God, and that foreign gods are now competing for the seat.

I accept the frame, and I want to give it the floor it lacks, because war of stories is where a Level 3 argument ends and where a Christian one must go further. If it is only a war of stories, then the relativist’s checkmate stands: your story, their story, who is to say? And the Islamist’s reply stands too: I prefer the story of submission; you prefer the story of grace; your preference is not law. The answer this fellowship gives is Level 4, and I will not retreat from it into comparative sociology: reality has a nature. The world is not a neutral stage on which stories compete; it is the sustained thought of a God who is love, and every story is either aligned with the nature of the One who holds the world in being, or misaligned with it. The Conscious Point Physics is our attempt to say this in the language of physics — that the substance of existence is conscious, that in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) is description and not metaphor — and its moral consequence is that alignment with God’s nature is not a preference; it is what good means, the way alignment with the grain is what a straight cut means. A story of submission to a master whose every page threatens is a story misaligned with the ground of being, and the misalignment shows in the fruits Burmawi catalogued from the inside: fear, guilt, conformity, stagnation, the poetess between the camels. A story of adoption by a Father who paid the debt Himself is aligned with the ground of being, and its fruits are the high-trust society, the confidence to build, the freedom of the neighbor, the imago Dei that even the unbelieving nations sign. Ye shall know them by their fruits (Matthew 7:16) is not a rule of thumb; it is what the alignment of a story with reality looks like from the outside. The West will not win a war of stories by telling its story louder. It will win by remembering that its story is true — and by living as if it were.

And that is why the empty throne is the right image and the wrong conclusion. The throne of the biblical God is not empty. The West vacated its acknowledgment of Him, and the gods now competing for the seat are competing for a chair that was never theirs. The remedy is not to elect a better god. It is repentance — remember therefore from whence thou art fallen — and the first works.

XIII. The Sons of Issachar: Judgments and Levers

The fellowship’s rule is that an essay which ends at understanding is not finished. Here are the judgments, stated provisionally and stated anyway, and the levers.

Judgments.

1. Islam is a comprehensive civilizational order that contains a religion. The First Amendment protects the religion — the prayer, the fast, the creed, the mosque, the conversion in either direction. It does not protect the program, and a republic that cannot tell the sofa from the room will lose the room. On this I judge Burmawi correct without reservation.
2. The instrument is not the State Department. Government theology is a sword that turns. The state’s proper work is to distinguish exercise from sedition, to refuse blasphemy law in every costume including the costume of Islamophobia, to screen immigration for allegiance to the program, and to shelter the apostate. The church’s work is everything Burmawi asked the state to do: to read the texts, tell the truth, and equip believers. On this I judge him half right and correct the half.
3. Muslims are neighbors and captives to rescue, not enemies to defeat; Islam is a system to be opposed and named as false. The moderate’s context-reading is welcome and his shielding of the source is not. Love the man; do not accept the shield.
4. The dissident right’s turn — Muslims as allies, Jews as the common enemy, Christ as the banner — is a lie by proportion in its facts and a seizure of Christ by force in its theology, and He will not be found under that banner. I judge it not merely mistaken but spiritually dangerous, and I say so to brothers whom I would rather not offend.
5. On Israel, the fellowship’s ground is Romans 11 and Genesis 12:3, not Darby’s chart. Reject the two-peoples system and reject replacement theology in the same breath; support Israel’s right to exist and defend herself on grounds of justice and covenant; retain the liberty to criticize her government as we criticize our own.
6. The red-green alliance is a de facto conspiracy that needs no coordination because its members serve one principal. The response is spiritual before it is political: name the principal, and refuse to be recruited by either of his servants — including the one wearing a cross.

Levers.

Prayer, named and specific. For Danny Burmawi, who cannot go home, and for the Ideological Defense Institute. For the Jordanian convert whose household is now Christian, and for every secret believer in Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, and the Gulf whose faith is a capital offense in the court of public opinion if not of law. For the Christians of Nigeria and Syria being killed this week. For the Muslim families in our own towns, that they may meet the Jesus who did not run. For Zohran Mamdani, by name, that the man be saved and the program fail. For Tucker Carlson and the young men who trust him, that a captured audience be freed from the story that is capturing it — they are not our enemies; they are ours to win back. For the King of Jordan, that a good man in spite of Islam might become a good man because of Christ.

Speech where speech reaches power. Through the Christos Voting Network, three asks: that our representatives oppose any federal or state measure that would define criticism of Islam as a hate offense; that they support asylum for apostates from Islam as a named category of religious persecution; and that the persecution of Christians in Nigeria and Syria be treated in foreign policy as the emergency it is. Small levers, named truthfully — for who hath despised the day of small things? (Zechariah 4:10) — outrank large levers imagined.

Formation. Burmawi issued a challenge: open the Qur’an at random and read. I convert it into an assignment for the fellowship. Read it — the Qur’an, and a Sira, and the Bukhari collection — not to master it as Burmawi once did, but as Bereans, who searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so (Acts 17:11). A Christian who has never read what Islam says about itself is defenseless against both the imam and the Tucker Carlson guest who tells him what it says. And apply the second test of Section III as you read: does this revelation ever rebuke its recipient? You will not need my essay after that. You will have Aisha’s.

Hospitality. The Grammar’s counsel on engaging Muslims stands: relationship first, questions before arguments, Jesus before Muhammad, patience, and no lone rangers. The man at the mosque down the road is not an ideology. He is a neighbor who has been told all his life that Christians know Islam is true and refuse it out of rebellion. He has never met one who loves him and can also tell him, gently, what his own book says about the substitution on the cross. Be that one.

The watcher’s soul. Luke 21:28 and 21:34 held together: look up, and do not let the heart be overcharged. A fellowship inflamed cannot sit on the council of Issachar. We are not afraid of Islam. We are afraid of a church that has become a museum of itself, and that fear is the beginning of the first works.

XIV. The Bet I Am Making

Burmawi said he did not convert because Christianity was the natural alternative once Islam failed, but because it was magnificent — the solution to everything — and that the gospel is everywhere, because everything must die so that the new may be born. He said it as a man who knows the price of the alternative in his own body: years of exile, a country he cannot enter, a family he cannot visit, because he left Islam and then did the thing that in Jordan is the worse crime: he defended Israel. He said the relationship with God in Islam is terror. He wept over the Qur’an and was afraid.

I believe him, and I believe the reason, and I stake myself on it. The God who holds the world in being is not a master who threatens on every page; He is a Father who paid what we owed and calls us sons. That is not my preference against the Islamist’s. It is the nature of things, and every civilization that has forgotten it has ended up under curtains. The candlesticks of Asia can be lit again. The mosaics are still on the ceiling. Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage (Galatians 5:1) — not the bondage of Sharia, and not the bondage of the fear that makes a church too polite to say that Sharia is bondage.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. — Romans 8:15

— Thomas

Sources

• Jeremy Boreing with Danny Burmawi, “A Former Muslim Exposes Lies About Islam,” The Jeremy Boreing Show, Ep. 39, PragerU, 7 July 2026. https://www.prageru.com/videos/a-former-muslim-exposes-lies-about-islam-or-ep-39
• Danny Burmawi, Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis (Ideological Defense Institute).
• Qur’an 4:157; 9:5; 9:29. Sahih al-Bukhari (Aisha’s remark on revelation; the traditions on the cat and the dog). Sahih Muslim (expulsion of Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula). Al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir, commentaries on Qur’an 4:157 (the substitution narrative).
• Increase Mather, The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation (1669). Blaise Pascal, Pensées, sections on the Jewish people as evidence of Providence.
• Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Pantheon, 2004).
• Fanack, “Jordan’s Christians: Small in Number, Big in Faith” (2023); Roya News, “Removal of religious statue in Fuheis sparks controversy” (8 January 2023); International Christian Concern, “Jordan’s Monarchy Seeks to Protect a Legacy of Religious Co-Existence” (17 February 2023).
• Renaissance Ministries, “The Kingdom of God and Kingdoms of Men” (18 April 2026). https://renaissance-ministries.com/2026/04/18/the-kingdom-of-god-and-kingdoms-of-men/
• Renaissance Ministries, “Endurance, Not Escape: Eschatology and the Christian Underground” (12 May 2026), and “The Alignment and the Watchman: Amir Tsarfati’s June 30 Update, the Ezekiel Horizon, and the Sons of Issachar Standard” (3 July 2026), both in the RM repository, https://github.com/Renaissance-Ministries/RM.
• Christos AI Theological Grammar v1.3, Parts VI and VII (Engaging Islam; the Absolute Standard; Conspiracy Epistemology; Testimony and Declaration; Kingdom Culture vs. Theocracy). https://github.com/Renaissance-Ministries/RM

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38

I. Principles of Islam – Why People Choose Islam:

People convert to Islam for many different reasons, but at its core Islam offers a worldview, a relationship with God, a moral framework, and promises about life after death. Some of the central promises and teachings of Islam include:

There is no single Muslim view on politics, law, and society.

What is Sharia?

“Sharia” literally means “the path” or “the way.” In Islamic thought, it refers to the ideal moral and legal guidance derived from the Qur’an and the teachings of Muhammad.

Many people hear “Sharia” and think only of criminal laws, but traditionally it covers much more:

• Worship and prayer
• Charity
• Marriage and family life
• Business ethics
• Contracts and inheritance
• Rules of war and peace
• Personal morality

So for many Muslims, Sharia is a comprehensive ethical framework, not just a legal code.

Is Islam just a personal religion?

Compared with some modern Western understandings of religion, Islam has historically been more comprehensive. Traditional Islam does not draw as sharp a line between: personal faith, ethics, law, and public life. As a result, many classical Muslim scholars saw Islam as providing guidance for both individuals and societies.

Do Muslims believe society should adopt Sharia?

There is a wide range of views.

Some Muslims say yes: Some Muslims believe that since God’s guidance is best for humanity, society should gradually align its laws with Islamic principles. Among those who hold this view, there are major differences:

• Some support democratic processes.
• Some support constitutional systems with Islamic influence.
• Some want only certain areas, such as family law, to reflect Sharia.
• A small minority advocate much stricter or authoritarian models.

Other Muslims say no: Many Muslims believe Islam should guide personal and community life but that the state should be neutral or largely secular.They may argue that:

• Faith should be chosen freely.
• Religious virtue cannot be forced.
• Modern pluralistic societies require equal citizenship regardless of religion.
• What creates pressure to adopt Sharia?

This depends on the society.

In some Muslim-majority countries, support comes from people who believe:

• Divine law is superior to human-made law.
• Religious values strengthen society.
• Islamic governance would reduce corruption or moral decline.

In other places, there is little public desire for extensive Sharia legislation, or the population prefers a mixture of civil law and religious principles.

It’s important to distinguish between:

1. Personal Sharia: How a Muslim lives their own life.
2. Community Sharia: Religious courts or guidance used voluntarily for matters such as marriage and inheritance.
3. State-enforced Sharia: National laws based partly or largely on Islamic jurisprudence.

A deeper tension

One of the biggest debates, both among Muslims and between Muslims and non-Muslims, is this: If God’s law is perfect, should society be organized around it? Muslims who answer “yes” often see public implementation as a logical consequence of belief. Muslims who answer “not necessarily” may argue that religious freedom, democracy, pluralism, and individual conscience require limits on state enforcement.

Why is this controversial in the West?

Many Western political traditions are built on ideas such as:

• separation of church and state,
• individual liberty,
• freedom of religion,
• laws based on democratic consent rather than divine revelation.

So when people hear that a religion has legal and political teachings, they naturally ask how those teachings relate to these principles. That debate is not unique to Islam. Similar questions have arisen in Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and other societies whenever religious beliefs influence public law. A useful distinction is that most Muslims around the world are simply trying to practice their faith personally, while debates about how much a state should be influenced by Sharia are political and theological questions on which Muslims themselves often disagree.

IV. Sharia and Islam:

VII. Christianity vs. Islam and Liberal Democracy:

260907 – Belonging to the One

by Thomas Abshier | Sep 9, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Belonging and Truth

A Christos Fellowship discussion essay on “Why Some People Will Believe Anything”

7 September 2026
Source Article: (When Belonging Becomes More Important Than Truth) by Cornell Overbeeke, MD, MS

The argument under discussion

The essay begins with a familiar puzzle. Intelligent, educated, decent people regularly defend propositions that look absurd, contradictory, or morally repugnant to anyone standing outside their circle. The author proposes that the puzzle dissolves once we drop a hidden assumption: that a belief’s main job is to describe reality. Beliefs do that, but they also do something else. They tell other people who we are. For some people, under some conditions, the second job crowds out the first.

The mechanism is built up in stages:

First, belief has a social function. Once a person cares about being accepted by a group, the question “Is this true?” is joined by “What must I believe to remain one of them?” The proposition becomes a badge. The author cites the conformity experiments in which participants gave obviously wrong answers about line lengths when everyone around them did, and he distinguishes following the crowd because the crowd may know something (informational influence) from following the crowd because dissent is costly (normative influence). The second kind does not require sincere agreement at the outset. It only requires that affirmation feel safer than questioning. Given time, the mind is skilled at manufacturing sincere reasons for conclusions it has strong incentives to reach.

Second, people differ in where their psychological authority sits. The inner-directed person carries something like a gyroscope; the other-directed person carries something like radar, constantly scanning for what is admired, what is embarrassing, what everyone thinks. Neither type is more intelligent than the other. Intelligence, in the author’s phrase, supplies the lawyer; it does not choose the client. The relevant variables are how much approval is worth, how painful rejection is, and how much of a person’s identity is drawn from membership.

Third, a group identity can become so central that it fuses with the self. At that point, a challenge to a group-defining belief is no longer heard as “your idea is wrong,” but as “your people are wrong,” and finally “you are wrong, you do not belong.” Evidence has acquired an enemy.

Fourth, and most striking, the beliefs that bind a group most tightly are often not its most plausible ones. Affirming something everyone already accepts proves nothing. Affirming something outsiders find hard to swallow is costly, and costly affirmation signals loyalty. The strange proposition works as a password. The author notes that creeds, oaths, initiations, and shared vocabularies are not inherently pathological; they are part of how any community is constructed. The danger begins when affirmation becomes the supreme virtue and questioning becomes treason.

Fifth, loyalty can capture moral perception itself. The same act is read differently depending on who performs it: an enemy’s failure proves incompetence, an ally’s failure proves impossible circumstances; an enemy’s cruelty proves wickedness, an ally’s cruelty was regrettable but necessary. The frightening possibility is not that such a person has no morality, but that loyalty has become the rule by which morality is applied.

Sixth, fanaticism is often a solution to doubt rather than an expression of certainty. Reality is ambiguous, and the honest answer to many questions is “I don’t know.” Tribal belief offers relief: approved explanations, approved vocabulary, trusted and distrusted authorities, and above all other people standing beside you. This is why refuting the fanatic’s argument so often fails. He is not defending an argument. He is defending his home.

The essay closes with a warning against the comfortable conclusion. Nearly everyone has tribal loyalties, wants approval, and reasons more generously about friends than enemies. Autonomy requires something more painful than intelligence: the willingness to lose. To lose a cherished opinion, to admit an enemy was right, to endure the disappointment of friends. The autonomous mind can tolerate loneliness, and that is its terrible advantage. The person who “will believe anything” believes something quite specific: whatever he must believe to remain one of us.

Why this belongs in a fellowship

A group of Christians reading this essay is in an awkward position, and the awkwardness is the point. The fellowship is a group. It has a creed. Its members affirm propositions that outsiders find hard to accept (the Bible is God’s inspired Word and speaks of the truth of the birth, righteous life, undeserved grace), and they draw comfort and identity from one another. Every mechanism the author describes is available to it. The question is not whether the fellowship is exposed to the dynamic but whether it has any resources against it.

It does, and they are older than the psychology.

The clearest statement of the author’s thesis in Scripture is not a warning against unbelief. It describes belief that stayed silent. John records that many among the rulers believed in Jesus, but because of the Pharisees they would not confess him, lest they be put out of the synagogue, because they loved the approval of men more than the approval of God. That is normative social influence, identity fusion, and the loyalty test in a single sentence, written about educated religious men nineteen centuries before the line-length experiments. The problem was not a lack of evidence. They had it. The problem was that confession carried a social cost, and they were unwilling to pay it.

The counter-example is just as clear. Micaiah stood before two kings and four hundred prophets who had unanimously prophesied victory, and when the messenger urged him to make his word agree with theirs, he answered that he would say what the Lord said to him. He was struck, imprisoned, and, as far as the record tells us, never vindicated in his own lifetime. That is the willingness to lose, exercised against the exact pressure the author describes: unanimity, authority, and the assurance that everyone like you already agrees.

Paul’s instruction not to be conformed to this world but transformed by the renewing of the mind is usually read as a warning against worldliness in the sense of vice. Read alongside this essay, it says something sharper. Conformity is a shape the mind takes, and the world will press that shape on it through the ordinary desire to belong. The alternative is not contrarianism, which is only conformity with the sign reversed, but a mind whose authority has been relocated. In the author’s metaphor, the gyroscope has to be set to something.

The creed problem

The author’s observation about costly beliefs deserves careful handling, because on its face it argues against creeds, and the fellowship has one.

The observation is that a hard-to-believe proposition makes an effective loyalty marker precisely because it is hard to believe. Christian confession includes propositions that outsiders find difficult: a crucified man raised bodily, a God who is three and one. Is the creed, then, a password?

Two things need to be separated. A proposition can be both hard for outsiders to accept and true. The difficulty of a claim is not evidence against it, any more than the ease of a claim is evidence for it. The author does not say otherwise; his point is about the social use a group makes of difficulty, not about the truth value of difficult claims. The test he proposes is whether questioning the proposition is treated as inquiry or as disloyalty.

That test can be applied. The apostolic writings themselves invite it. Paul tells the Corinthians that if Christ has not been raised, their faith is vain and they are of all men most to be pitied. That is not the language of a password. A password is not supposed to be falsifiable; it is supposed to be affirmed. A man who says “if this is false, we are fools” has staked the community on a truth claim and invited the question. The Bereans were commended for searching the Scriptures to see whether what Paul said was so. On the author’s own terms, the difference between a creed and a password is whether the community permits and honors the search.

The fellowship should therefore hold its confession the way the apostles held it: as a claim about what happened, open to the question “Is it true?”, and not as a badge whose function is to sort the faithful from the uncommitted. The moment “I believe this because I am one of you” replaces “I believe this because it is so,” the creed has become the thing the author warns about, and no amount of orthodoxy in its content will save it.

Loyalty and moral perception

The section on moral disengagement is the one most likely to be read as being about other people. That reading should be resisted.

The pattern the author describes, in which the same act is judged by who performs it, is not confined to political tribes. It appears wherever people take sides. A congregation can excuse in its own leadership what it condemns in another’s. A movement can describe its opponents’ methods as manipulation and its own identical methods as strategy. A fellowship can hold an outsider’s claim to a standard of evidence it never applies to a claim made from inside the circle.

The author’s diagnosis is asymmetry: microscopic suspicion toward the other tribe, scarcely a question toward one’s own. This is a usable test. A member can ask himself whether he would accept a given argument, or a given piece of evidence, if it came from someone he distrusted. If the answer is no, the belief is held on loyalty rather than truth, and the fact that the belief may happen to be correct does not change what holds it.

Scripture gives the same test in a harder form. Nathan told David a story about a rich man who took a poor man’s lamb, and David, judging the act with no idea who had performed it, pronounced the man worthy of death. Then Nathan told him who it was. The story works because David’s moral perception was intact right up to the moment loyalty, in this case to himself, would have engaged. The parable bypassed the loyalty. That is what the author means by the frightening possibility that loyalty becomes the principle by which morality is applied, and it is what the prophet meant by “thou art the man.”

Fanaticism and the tolerance of not knowing

The author’s account of fanaticism as relief from doubt bears on how a fellowship talks.

A community that cannot say “I don’t know” will manufacture certainty, and manufactured certainty has to be defended by volume and by solidarity rather than by evidence. The observation that the loudest voice is not necessarily the most certain is consistent with a good deal of pastoral experience. The person who cannot bear a question is often the person for whom the question has already gained a foothold.

The Christian faith does not require eliminating uncertainty. It requires trust in a person, and trust is what one exercises precisely where one does not have full sight. The father who said “I believe; help my unbelief” was not rebuked. Job’s friends, who had an approved explanation for everything, were. A fellowship in which members can say “I don’t know” without losing standing has removed one of the main pressures the author identifies, because it no longer needs the tribe to supply what honest inquiry cannot.

This also bears on how the fellowship treats the person who is wrong. If refuting an argument feels to its holder like an attack on his home, then argument alone will rarely move him, and this is true of members as much as of outsiders. What moves him, if anything does, is the discovery that he can change his mind and still have a home. A community that makes belonging contingent on affirmation has made itself unable to correct anyone, because correction and expulsion have become the same thing.

Autonomy and the willingness to lose

The essay’s conclusion, that autonomy requires the willingness to lose, is where it comes closest to the gospel without naming it.

The author lists what autonomy may cost: a cherished opinion, the satisfaction of having been right, the approval of friends, one’s place inside a circle one wished to remain in. He observes that the autonomous mind’s advantage is that it can tolerate loneliness. He does not say where such tolerance comes from, and the essay, being psychological, is not obliged to.

The Christian answer is that the willingness to lose is not a temperament some people happen to have. It is the condition of discipleship. Whoever would save his life will lose it. If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself. Jesus warned that a man’s enemies would be those of his own household and that his followers would be put out of the synagogues, and then go to a death in which he was abandoned by every human circle to which he belonged. The cross is, among other things, the willingness to lose belonging for the sake of truth carried to its limit.

This reframes the author’s loneliness. The autonomous mind, as he describes it, tolerates loneliness by strength of character. The disciple tolerates it because, in the final analysis, he is not alone; his gyroscope is set to a person who has already stood outside every circle. That is what allows a man to be inner-directed without being merely self-directed, which is the distinction the author’s metaphor leaves open. A gyroscope set to the self is only a smaller tribe.

The warning against contrarianism belongs here too. Standing alone is not a virtue in itself, and a person can make a badge of dissent as easily as of conformity. The author’s test still applies: is the dissenting belief being held because it is true, or because it identifies the dissenter as a certain kind of person? The contrarian who needs to be against the crowd is as other-directed as the conformist who needs to be with it. He has simply reversed the reading on his radar.

Questions for the fellowship

The essay leaves the fellowship with questions to ask itself rather than others.

Whether members are free to question the group’s shared views, including its views on matters outside the creed, without a cost to their standing. Whether the group applies the same evidentiary standard to claims made from inside as to claims made from outside. Whether members can say “I don’t know” and be left alone. Whether a member who changed his mind on a contested matter would still have a home. Whether the fellowship’s confession is a truth claim open to the Berean search or a marker of who belongs. Whether the group has any belief it would be unwilling to lose even if shown to be false, and if so, what that belief is doing.

None of these has an obvious answer. The author’s closing caution applies to the fellowship as much as to anyone: the temptation is to divide mankind into conformists and independent thinkers and place oneself among the latter. The better response is to accept that the dynamic he describes is operating on everyone in the room, and to build a community in which belonging does not require anyone to lie. That is a harder thing to build than a tribe, and it is the only kind of fellowship that can be trusted with the truth.

260906 – Evidence of Truth

by Thomas Abshier | Sep 6, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Discerning Truth in the Gospel

Jurisprudence and the Biblical Witness

Fellowship Essay by Charlie Gutierrez | 6 September 2026 

Question 1: American jurisprudence has accepted rules of evidence. What are they, and how can they be applied to spiritual knowledge?

American evidence law is a good lens for this question because it’s one of the most developed systems humans have built for deciding what counts as adequately supported belief under uncertainty. Here’s the core framework, then where the analogy to spiritual knowledge holds up and where it strains.

Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE):

The Federal Rules of Evidence — the codified rules that govern what evidence is admissible in U.S. federal courts.

What FRE refers to in law

The Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) are a comprehensive set of rules adopted by Congress to ensure fairness, reliability, and efficiency in federal trials. They define:

• What counts as relevant evidence (FRE 401)
• When relevant evidence may still be excluded (FRE 403)
• How witnesses may testify
• How documents, physical evidence, and scientific evidence must be authenticated
• Privileges, hearsay exceptions, expert testimony standards, and more

FRE 401–403: establish the foundational threshold for admissibility:

• FRE 401 — Relevance: Evidence is relevant if it makes a fact “more or less probable than it would be without the evidence.”
• FRE 402 — General admissibility: Relevant evidence is admissible unless another rule excludes it.
• FRE 403 — Balancing test: Even relevant evidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed by unfair prejudice, confusion, misleading the jury, undue delay, or waste of time.

Why FRE matters

These rules are the backbone of evidentiary practice. Every objection, every admissibility argument, and every evidentiary ruling in federal court ultimately traces back to the FRE framework.

FRE: The main categories

Relevance (FRE 401–403). Evidence must make a fact “more or less probable than it would be without the evidence,” and even relevant evidence can be excluded if its probative value is outweighed by prejudice, confusion, or waste of time.

Hearsay (FRE 801–807). An out-of-court statement offered to prove the truth of what it asserts is presumptively inadmissible, because the original speaker can’t be cross-examined. There are many exceptions (excited utterances, business records, dying declarations, statements against interest) — all justified by circumstances that make fabrication unlikely.

Authentication (FRE 901–902). Before evidence (a document, recording, object) can be considered, its proponent must show it is what it purports to be.

Witness competency and personal knowledge (FRE 601–602). Witnesses generally must testify from firsthand perception, not speculation or secondhand belief.

Opinion and expert testimony (FRE 701–702, Daubert). Lay witnesses may offer opinions only when rationally based on their own perception. Experts can go further, but their methodology must be reliable — tested, peer-reviewed, subject to known error rates, and generally accepted in the relevant field.

Judicial notice (FRE 201). Facts that are indisputable and either generally known or verifiable from unimpeachable sources can be accepted without formal proof.

Burdens and standards of proof. Civil cases typically use “preponderance of the evidence” (more likely than not); criminal cases require “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The standard shifts depending on the stakes of being wrong.

Corroboration and impeachment. Testimony gains weight when independently corroborated, and loses weight when a witness’s credibility, bias, or consistency can be attacked.

Applying this to spiritual knowledge

The exercise mostly translates into asking: what role does personal testimony play, and what would corroboration or impeachment even look like here? A few honest mappings:

• Personal knowledge/eyewitness testimony maps onto religious experience or revelation. Just as courts allow eyewitness testimony despite its fallibility, many religious epistemologies (e.g., the “Reformed epistemology” of Alvin Plantinga, or William Alston’s work on perceiving God) argue that direct experience can be a properly basic source of belief, not requiring external proof, in the same way sense perception is.
• Hearsay problems show up acutely in scripture and tradition — claims transmitted through unverifiable chains of testimony, sometimes centuries removed from the event, without cross-examination of the original source. Historians of religion apply something like hearsay-exception reasoning: does the transmission chain have features (early dating, multiple independent sources, embarrassment criterion, hostile-witness corroboration) that make fabrication less likely?
• Corroboration is where comparative religion and testimony-based arguments (like some versions of the argument from religious experience) try to do work: if many people across unconnected traditions report structurally similar experiences, does convergence function like independent witnesses?
• Authentication parallels debates over textual provenance — manuscript dating, authorship attribution, archaeological corroboration of scriptural claims.
• Expert/Daubert-style reliability is the hardest fit. Daubert asks for testable methodology and known error rates. Spiritual claims are largely not falsifiable in that sense, which is precisely the objection empiricist philosophers (from Hume through logical positivists like Ayer) raised: if a claim can’t in principle be checked against a defeating instance, it doesn’t function as ordinary “evidence” does.
• Burden and standard of proof is really a values question in disguise — how the analogy works depends on how much you think is at stake in being wrong, and there’s real philosophical disagreement (evidentialism, à la W.K. Clifford’s “it is wrong always… to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” versus fideism/pragmatism, à la William James’s “The Will to Believe,” which argues some existentially forced questions warrant belief past the evidence).

Where the analogy breaks down

Courtroom evidence rules exist to adjudicate a specific, falsifiable, third-party-checkable dispute within a system with subpoena power, cross-examination, and an adversarial process that forces claims into the open. Spiritual knowledge claims are frequently first-person, non-repeatable, and resistant to the kind of external check the rules assume is available. So the honest answer is that evidentiary rules can structure the inquiry — they’re a useful checklist for testing rigor, provenance, and internal consistency — but they can’t fully settle the question, because the deepest disagreement is prior to the rules: whether personal religious experience counts as a category of evidence at all, or is a different kind of claim (meaning-making, faith commitment) that evidentiary frameworks weren’t built to arbitrate.

_______________________________

Question 2: From within the frameworks of recorded spiritual inquiry, what are the rules of spiritual evidence by which men struggle to know the truths of the kingdom of God that is within us?

That phrase — “the kingdom of God is within you” — comes from Luke 17:21, and Tolstoy later used it as the title of his book on inward Christianity and nonviolence. It points to something the courtroom analogy can’t quite reach: an inquiry where the witness, the evidence, and the judge are, in some sense, the same person. Different traditions have nonetheless developed real disciplines — “rules of evidence,” if you like — for testing whether an inward conviction is trustworthy or self-deception. A few of the major ones:

The test of fruit. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16-20) is probably the most widely shared criterion across traditions: a spiritual perception is validated not by its intensity but by what it produces over time — humility, charity, steadiness, self-mastery — versus pride, division, or appetite dressed up as revelation. This consequentialist test applies to an internal event, and it requires patience; fruit takes a season to show.

The test of peace versus agitation (Ignatian discernment). Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises lay out detailed “rules for discernment of spirits” — the idea that authentic movements toward God tend to bring a settled, deep peace (“consolation”), even amid difficulty, while counterfeit or disordered impulses tend to produce restlessness, anxious urgency, or a peace that only exists at the surface. Quakers developed something structurally similar with the discipline of “waiting worship” and testing a leading against the settled sense of the gathered meeting before acting on it.

The test of consistency and coherence. Does the new perception harmonize with what has already been soundly established — scripture, prior teaching, the moral law as best understood — or does it require you to discard everything previously trustworthy? Most traditions treat radical discontinuity as a warning sign, not proof of depth. 1 John 4:1 puts this directly: “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God.”

The test of communal weighing. Paul’s instruction that when someone speaks under inspiration, “let the others judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29) reflects a recurring pattern: private conviction is submitted to a community capable of discernment, not because the community is infallible, but because self-deception is easier alone. This is the closest spiritual analog to cross-examination — a check external to the witness.

The test of humility and self-forgetfulness. Many mystics (John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, the desert fathers) warn that the ego is the most persistent counterfeiter of spiritual experience — that visions and certainties which center or exalt the self are the ones most to be doubted, while those that decrease the self and increase charity toward others carry more weight. This is why the tradition is suspicious of spiritual experience that arrives with grandiosity attached.

The test of reproducibility across witnesses. Not experimental repeatability, but something more like convergent testimony: when contemplatives across unconnected traditions and centuries — Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, Vedantic — describe structurally similar interior states (dissolution of self-boundary, unitive love, ineffability, noetic certainty), some take that convergence as a weak but real form of corroboration, in the way independent witnesses strengthen a case.

The test of ineffability held honestly. The apophatic strand (Pseudo-Dionysius, the Cloud of Unknowing, negative theology generally) insists that whatever rules you apply, the deepest truths exceed propositional capture — so the last rule of evidence is almost anti-evidentiary: a genuine perception of the kingdom tends to leave the knower more aware of what they don’t know, not less. Certainty that closes off further inquiry is treated with suspicion.

The Eastern parallel, for comparison. The Buddha’s Kalama Sutta gives a strikingly similar structure from outside the Abrahamic traditions: don’t believe on the basis of report, tradition, rumor, scripture, logic, or the authority of a teacher — but when you know for yourselves that certain things lead to harm or to welfare, accept or reject them accordingly. Fruit, again, as the final court.

What’s notable is that these criteria converge on something evidentiary structures in law also value — corroboration, consistency, and consequence over time — while explicitly refusing the thing courtroom evidence relies on most: an external, third-party-checkable fact. The “rules” here are less about proving a proposition to someone else and more about a discipline for not fooling yourself, tested against fruit, peace, community, and time rather than against a jury.

If it’s useful, I could go deeper into any one strand — Ignatian discernment in more detail, the desert fathers on diakrisis (discernment as the “mother of virtues”), or how Quaker testing of leadings actually works in practice.

Quaker “leadings”

More on the topic of “How Do You Know?”

By Charlie Gutierrez | 12 September 2026

Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends), founded by George Fox in 17th-century England, built their entire religious practice around the idea that God speaks directly and continuously to individuals through an “Inward Light” or “Inward Teacher” — which immediately raises the problem this whole conversation has been circling: if everyone can receive direct guidance, how do you keep that from collapsing into everyone doing whatever they feel like and calling it God? Quakers call a sense of inward guidance toward action a “leading,” and over more than three centuries they built a genuinely detailed discipline for testing one before acting on it. It’s one of the more practical, procedural versions of spiritual discernment in the traditions we’ve discussed.

The starting suspicion: leadings are tested, not trusted automatically. Quaker practice assumes that not every strong inward conviction is from God — it might be ego, a wish, an anxiety, or plain error, dressed up as guidance. So a leading is treated as a hypothesis to be tested, not a command to be obeyed on the spot. This is a deliberately slower epistemology than most charismatic traditions: the stronger and more urgent a leading feels, the more Quakers traditionally counsel patience before acting.

Testing against Scripture, tradition, and past experience. Early Friends checked a leading against the Bible and against the accumulated experience of the community — not as an external rulebook overriding the Light, but on the premise that the same Spirit that spoke through scripture wouldn’t now contradict itself. A leading that required you to abandon core Christian ethics was, by that fact, suspect.

Testing through “waiting worship.” Quaker unprogrammed worship — sitting in silence until someone is moved to speak — is itself a discernment mechanism. A person who feels a leading to speak in meeting is expected to sit with it, let it be “seasoned,” and only speak if the sense of call persists and intensifies rather than fades. Speaking too quickly, too often, or with evident self-importance is understood as a sign the message may not be genuine ministry.

Testing through the “clearness committee.” This is the most distinctive Quaker institution for the purpose. When a Friend faces a major leading — marriage, a career change, resistance to military service, a call to ministry — they can convene a small group of trusted Friends to serve as a “clearness committee.” Critically, the committee doesn’t give advice or tell the person what to do. Members ask honest, open questions designed to help the person hear their own inward Teacher more clearly, on the premise that the answer is already present within the person and the committee’s job is to help clear away confusion, self-interest, and fear that obscure it. This is close to Socratic method deployed as a discernment tool rather than an argumentative one.

Testing through the “sense of the meeting.” For corporate decisions, Quakers don’t vote. They seek unity — a “sense of the meeting” that emerges through worship-based deliberation, where disagreement is treated as information the group hasn’t yet fully digested rather than something to be outvoted. A single Friend can register a formal objection (“standing in the way”) that halts a decision, which functions as an extreme form of requiring near-total corroboration before the group treats a leading as authoritative for the whole body.

Testing by fruit and consistency over time. As in the traditions we discussed earlier, genuine leadings are expected to produce good fruit — peace, integrity, faithfulness — and to hold up under sustained reflection rather than evaporating once the emotional intensity passes. John Woolman, the 18th-century Quaker whose leading against slaveholding eventually helped move the entire Society of Friends to abolitionism, is the classic example: he tested his leading for years, moved gradually and non-coercively (visiting slaveholding Friends personally rather than denouncing them publicly), and it was the patience and consistency of that process — not the initial conviction alone — that gave it lasting authority within the community.

Testing through plainness and the absence of self-will. Quakers historically distrusted leadings that conveniently aligned with the person’s own comfort, ambition, or desire for status — much like the desert fathers’ suspicion of visions that exalt the self. A leading that costs the person something, or runs against their own interest, was given more credence than one that flattered it.

The overall shape is recognizably continuous with everything else we’ve discussed — fruit, community, patience, humility as tests against self-deception — but Quakers are unusual in having formalized it into actual institutions (the clearness committee, the sense of the meeting) rather than leaving it as informal counsel from an elder. It’s discernment with committee structure.

John Woolman’s abolitionist leadings.

John Woolman (1720–1772) is probably the best-documented case in religious history of someone testing an inward leading patiently, publicly, and over decades — and his own journal records the process in remarkable detail, which is partly why it became a classic of American devotional literature (Woolman was writing what he understood as testimony, not autobiography).

The first leading: writing a will. The origin story, as Woolman tells it, is almost anticlimactic. Around 1742, as a young shopkeeper’s clerk in New Jersey, his employer asked him to write a bill of sale for an enslaved woman. Woolman wrote it, since he’d already made the sale verbally, but he recorded that doing so gave him a lasting inward uneasiness — “I was young, and my employer’s request… disquieted me.” He didn’t yet have a fully formed abolitionist theology. He had a felt wrongness that he didn’t immediately act on or suppress — he let it sit, which is itself the first move of Quaker discernment: not dismissing an uncomfortable leading, but not overreacting to it either.

Refusing to write documents, one small act at a time. The leading matured slowly through concrete, small refusals rather than dramatic gestures. When later asked to write a will transferring enslaved people as property, Woolman told the client he could write it but believed slavekeeping was inconsistent with Christianity — and, remarkably, the man freed his slaves on the spot. Woolman treated this not as proof he was right, but as one data point, consistent with the leading, to be weighed alongside everything else.

Testing through years of personal visits, not public denunciation. From the 1740s onward, Woolman began traveling — on foot, deliberately avoiding stagecoaches later in life once he learned of harm to the horses and drivers, which tells you something about how far his sensitivity to unconsidered harm eventually extended — to visit Quaker slaveholders individually, sitting with them, asking questions, sharing his concern personally rather than condemning them from a pulpit. This mirrors the clearness-committee ethic even though he was the one raising the leading rather than the one being questioned: he wasn’t trying to win an argument, but to help slaveholding Friends arrive at their own inward recognition of the wrong.

Submitting the leading to the body — repeatedly, and slowly. Woolman brought his concern to Quaker meetings for decades, and the Society of Friends moved with characteristic caution — testing his leading against Scripture, against the “sense of the meeting,” and against the discomfort of Friends who owned slaves and had economic interests at stake. He wrote Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754, with a second part in 1762), laying out his reasoning carefully rather than polemically, and kept refining and resubmitting it as his own thinking sharpened. This is the “seasoning” process—a leading that persists and clarifies through repeated testing, rather than one that flares and fades.

A leading tested against his own self-interest, not for it. A detail worth noting: on trips where he stayed in the homes of slaveholding Friends, Woolman insisted on paying the enslaved people directly for any services they performed for him, out of his own funds — a small, costly, unglamorous practice that cut against his own convenience and expense. This is exactly the criterion the tradition uses to sort true leadings from self-serving ones: does it cost you something, or does it flatter you?

Result: incremental, real institutional change. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting began pressuring individual Friends to manumit enslaved people through the 1750s–60s, and by 1776 — a few years after Woolman’s death — the Yearly Meeting required members to free their slaves or face disownment from the Society. Quakers became the first organized religious body in America to collectively oppose and prohibit slaveholding among their own members, and Woolman’s decades of patient, individual, non-coercive witness is generally credited as the single most important force behind that shift.

Death consistent with the leading. Woolman died of smallpox in York, England, in 1772, while on a religious visit to English Quakers — still, at the end, following the same pattern of person-to-person witness rather than institutional pronouncement that had defined the whole leading from the start.

What makes Woolman such a strong case study for everything we’ve discussed is that nothing about his process was fast or dramatic. It was a single inward discomfort, held for thirty years, continually re-tested against Scripture, against the corporate discernment of his meeting, against his own comfort and self-interest, and against its fruit — and it was the sheer duration and consistency of that testing, not the initial intensity of the feeling, that eventually carried authority for an entire religious body. It’s the desert fathers’ warning against unchecked zeal and the Quaker clearness-committee ethic both showing up in one life, played out over decades rather than in a single decision.

Trying the Case

A Response to “Evidence of Truth”

Fellowship Essay by Thomas | 13 September 2026

Last week’s discussion kept arriving at the same question from different directions. Michael asked how one knows which of two sincere believers, a Mormon and a Lutheran, holds the truth, and how one knows which of a man’s several transformations of personality and belief was the real one. Susan noticed that the test scripture gives for a messenger is hard to apply to the authors of scripture themselves. Leonard asked how large Christ’s tent is, and I replied that the Bible goes on the altar and everything else goes on the bookshelf, because I take the Bible as closest to the apostolic witness, drawn from the converging multi-vocal testimony of Christ’s life, teaching, and promise. Charlie’s essay this week takes the question head-on: what rules do we use to decide that a claim about God is adequately supported?

His essay lays out two sets of rules. The first is the FRE (Federal Rules of Evidence), one of the most carefully built systems people have made for deciding what to believe when certainty is not available. The second is the set of disciplines the spiritual traditions themselves developed to test whether an inward conviction comes from God or from oneself. I want to walk through both sets using last week’s testimonies as examples, because I think the four conversions we studied are exactly the kind of evidence these rules were designed to weigh.

The courtroom rules and the Gospel

Personal knowledge. A witness may testify only to what he perceived himself. The Bible meets the criteria of testimony from qualified witnesses. The apostles were there. John opens his first letter by insisting on it: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). Whatever else can be said about the New Testament, it presents itself as eyewitness testimony, and the earliest readers, some of whom were also there, and their testimony is accepted it as such. A revelation received centuries later, however sincere, is testimony about an event the witness did not see. That is not a reason to call it false. It is a reason to give it a different weight.

Hearsay and its exceptions. Charlie notes that scripture is, on its face, hearsay: statements transmitted through chains of people who cannot be cross-examined. He also notes the exceptions, which deserve attention because they apply to statements made under conditions that make fabrication unlikely. A statement against interest is one such condition. The apostles’ testimony cost them their livelihoods, their standing, and in most cases their lives. Dying declarations are another; Stephen, Peter, and Paul all died affirming what they had said. The criterion of embarrassment is a third: the Gospels record the disciples as cowards, doubters, and slow learners, and report that the first witnesses to the resurrection were women, whose testimony carried little weight in that culture. No one inventing a story to persuade a first-century audience would have written it that way. Greg Viehman, in his testimony, reached this same conclusion as a physician evaluating the record, and found that no alternative explanation of the empty tomb survived.

Impeachment and the hostile witness. The strongest witness in any case is the one who had every reason to testify the other way. Paul was a Pharisee, a persecutor of the church, a man with nothing to gain and everything to lose by joining it. Greg named him as the evidence that finished the case. Rosaria is the same kind of witness in our own day: a tenured activist who opened the Bible to discredit it and was overturned by it. Susan, who rejected the faith of her upbringing for fifteen years before returning, is a milder instance of the same pattern. When the case for a claim rests on witnesses who began as its opponents, the usual impeachment for bias runs backward.

Corroboration. Four witnesses, unknown to one another, three of them on video and one in this Fellowship, reported the same sequence: intellectual acceptance of the claims, then a change of heart they had not expected, then the discovery of Galatians 5:22 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,” as the description of what had happened. Independent witnesses converging on the same detail is what a court means by corroboration. Greg, Susan, and Rosaria did not compare notes.

Authentication. Before a document is admitted, you must show it is what it claims to be. Manuscript dating, textual criticism, and archaeology do this work, and they have done it more thoroughly for the New Testament than for any other ancient document. Charlie’s essay rightly puts this in the category of provenance. It is also the category where a second scripture that appeared in the nineteenth century with no manuscript history faces its hardest test, and I think it is fair to say that Charlie’s own reservations about the Book of Mormon are authentication reservations.

The standard of proof. The standard of proof is the level of certainty the law requires before a fact-finder may decide an issue. Different standards reflect the court’s assessment of the relative stakes of being wrong — the higher the potential harm from an erroneous decision, the higher the required standard of proof. What is at stake in the Gospel claim is the whole shape of a life and whatever follows it. William James argued that some questions are forced, meaning that refusing to decide is itself a decision, and that for such questions one may reasonably believe past what the evidence compels. I would put it more simply. The question “did Jesus rise” cannot be left open the way “is there life on Mars” can. Greg saw this at once: if it happened, it is the most important event in history, and if it did not, it is a fairy tale, and a man cannot live as though it were both.

Where the analogy strains. Charlie is right that the Daubert standard, which asks for a testable method and a known error rate, fits poorly. The resurrection cannot be repeated in a laboratory, but neither can the history of any given event. This is the challenge of veracity every past event must face; it is the heart of every court case and the significance of evidence. The changed heart is one type of evidence. Susan’s challenge to the unbeliever was to run the experiment: pray earnestly and read the Bible daily for a season, and see. Greg’s challenge was the same: call on Christ and test him. Uncounted people have run the experiment across two thousand years. Some change dramatically; others notice only a new voice of conscience. There are those of other religions who claim change, and perhaps it is the light of Christ that is in all that is being awakened by their newly declared devotion to God. Claims of a changed heart are subjective, but changed behavior can be validated objectively and statistically. Such tests may have been done. A statistics-based proof is not a courtroom proof; it is more of a science-type proof that supports a hypothesis, but does not prove causality or uniqueness.

The rules of the traditions

Charlie’s second set of rules addresses the harder case: not whether Christ rose, but whether a particular inward conviction is from God. Here the witness, the evidence, and the judge are the same person, and self-deception is the constant hazard. I want to take his seven tests and examine their utility.

Fruit. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16). This is the test the four testimonies pass most plainly. Ruth Viehman’s statement that she is married to a different man (Greg’s transformation) is fruit observed from outside, by the person best placed to see it. Susan’s joy and peace have lasted years. Rosaria’s life was rebuilt. Fruit takes a season, which is why testimony given decades after conversion weighs more than testimony given the week after.

Peace. The Ignatian rule is that movements from God bring a settled, deep peace even in difficulty, while counterfeits bring restlessness and surface calm. Greg woke up peaceful and content for no reason, and checked his medicine cabinet before he believed it. Rosaria found that the words of Hebrews 4 undid her, and the peace came only after she went all the way across to Christ. Both fit the rule, and the rule fits the fruit of the Spirit.

Consistency. Does the new perception harmonize with what is already soundly established, or does it require discarding everything previously deemed trustworthy? A later revelation that agrees with the apostolic record may be true or may be an elaboration. To discern trustworthiness in this case, whatever contradicts it fails the test. “Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1). Susan’s observation that we know little about the authors of some biblical books is fair, but the test is still available: the books that were received into the canon were received because the churches that had known the apostles judged them consistent with what the apostles had taught.

Communal weighing. “Let the other judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29). Charlie’s essay calls this the nearest spiritual analog to cross-examination and the communal test in operation. When Susan proposes a reading of Ephraim and Manasseh that none of us has heard before, and I ask her to write it up so the group can weigh it, that is the same test. A private conviction should be compared with the group’s judgment.

Humility. The mystics warn that the ego can counterfeit spiritual experience. Certainties can exalt the self and blind the heart with confidence. I look at myself; I had an experience that was not noble or credible in its origin, a revelation that I believe was from God, but it came in an altered state. The fruit was a completely changed life, and a forty-year development of a theory of everything. It appears consistent with conventional physics, but adds a layer of understanding of structure and mechanism that makes it plausible that we live, move, and exist within Him. I hope conventional physicists will find my vision, logic, and proofs compelling, see it as evidence of God’s existence and omniscient presence in the material world, and acknowledge Him in their lives and science. An impact of such magnitude tempts the ego to exalt itself. And of course, we should challenge such revelations, logic, and evidence lest we follow a false path. It is easy to follow a charismatic man, be enticed by new doctrines, and relinquish the liberty we were given in Christ.

Convergence. Contemplatives across unconnected traditions describe similar interior states, and some take that as weak corroboration. I said last week that the mystical literature of other traditions gives me a glimpse of a world beyond this one and strengthens my faith that such a world exists, without my following those traditions. Charlie’s essay gives a category for that: convergent testimony is evidence that something is there, even when it is not evidence for a particular account of what it is.

Ineffability. The last rule is nearly the opposite of a rule: a true perception of the kingdom tends to leave the knower more aware of what he does not know. Susan’s vision-therapy picture belongs here. The reader who has suppressed the verses that do not fit has a single flat image and feels certain. The one who is given depth perception sees both and knows the reconciliation is still in progress. Certainty that closes inquiry is a warning sign; a process that may last a lifetime is more likely the real thing, as Paul struggled throughout life to the end: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:7)

What the rules settle and what they do not

Charlie’s essay ends by saying that evidentiary rules can structure the inquiry but cannot settle it, because the deepest disagreement lies before the rules: whether personal religious experience counts as evidence at all. I think that is exactly right, and I think last week’s testimonies show where the settlement actually happens. Greg had the courtroom case complete and was unchanged. What settled the matter was not a further argument but a walk-in patient’s question and a night on his knees, followed by a morning of peace that he could not explain away. The rules of evidence brought him to the door. Something else opened it.

So the rules do two things for us. They tell us which claims deserve to be taken seriously enough to test, and here the Gospel passes a court’s tests of evidence. And they give us a discipline for not fooling ourselves once we have begun to believe. What they cannot do is substitute for the test itself. The kingdom of God is within you, and the only way to gather evidence for what is within you is to go in.

Questions for our discussion

1. Which of the courtroom rules do you find most persuasive when applied to the Gospel, and which do you think a skeptic would rightly say does not apply?
2. Charlie’s essay distinguishes evidence for a proposition from a discipline for not fooling yourself. Where in your own walk have you needed the second more than the first?
3. If communal weighing is the spiritual form of cross-examination, how well does this Fellowship perform it? What would make our testing of one another’s convictions more honest and more charitable at the same time?
4. The standard of proof shifts with the stakes. What standard did you actually apply when you came to believe, and would you apply the same one now?

— Thomas

What Is Truth?

Fellowship Discussion Essay – September 13, 2026

The meeting centered on Charlie’s essay “Evidence of Truth,” which set American rules of evidence beside the disciplines spiritual traditions have developed for testing an inward conviction. Before the essay, Michael presented notes carried over from the previous week, which turned the first hour toward the nature of hell, judgment, and repentance. The second hour returned to the essay’s question: How do we know something is true? This essay records the points made in both halves and the responses given.

1. Michael’s notes from the previous week

Christians killing Christians. Michael proposed a way through the problem he has raised before: that Christians have made war on one another for centuries. All factions agree on the behavioral teaching: the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, love of neighbor. If the emphasis were placed there and taken off what he called the vehicle code, the doctrinal fine print by which one faction declares another to be of the devil, the armies would have less to fight about. Thomas objected that scripture nowhere instructs one believer to call another of the devil for holding a different version. Michael agreed that it does not, but observed that people do it anyway, and that the problem is getting them to stop.

Living forever. Michael reported that the previous meeting had corrected an assumption of his. He had supposed that only Christians live forever; he now understood that in this paradigm everyone does, and that the difference is where and in what state. He is neither buying nor denying the assumption. He asked for more on purgatory, which the group had not discussed, and whether life after death might resemble the state before birth, in which case he has many further questions.

The samurai and the monk. He told the story of a samurai who asked a famous monk whether heaven and hell exist. The monk insulted him until the samurai drew his sword to kill him, at which point the monk said, “This is hell.” The samurai understood, sheathed the sword, and the monk said, “This is heaven.”

Hell as pain. Michael offered two reference points from his own life. As a boy of seven, left alone for the first time, he melted all the household candles in a pot to play with the wax, heard his parents at the door, poured the wax down the sink, burned his hand trying to clear it, and then met his parents with the words, “You aren’t going in the kitchen, are you?” The point was the layered experience of pain, fear, and consequence. The second was a stroke in 1982, during which he lay for five days in undifferentiated agony, too far gone even to think that he needed a pain reliever until the fourth day. From this he posed a question about the design of hell: maximal pain without awareness becomes a kind of white noise, while a lesser pain with enough consciousness to know one is in it may be worse. A competent designer of hell, he said, would have to decide which, and God is up to it.

Love, kindness, and trust. He has often lived without these, traveling in a van, and it has not bothered him; rocks, rivers, and panoramas are a joy and do not need to love him back. He does not trust anyone; he assigns likelihoods instead, and personal friends rate very high. He asked whether heaven as immersion in love, kindness, and trust leaves room for the loner, such as the frontier trappers who wanted nothing from society, and whether the afterlife differs from this one only by being non-physical.

The fruit of the tree of knowledge. He noted that the original sin was eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In his reading, not questioning what is good and evil is Eden; questioning gets one expelled; ignorance is bliss. Yet this forum, and this vision, is precisely the questioning of good and evil.

Peter Pan. He closed with a passage from Barrie in which Captain Hook bites the hand Peter extends to help him, and every child who meets that first betrayal remembers it forever, except Peter, who met it often and always forgot. Michael identified with Peter: he accepts others’ mistrust and loves them anyway, since they came by it for good reasons.

2. The nature of hell

A short history of the word. While Michael spoke, Charlie looked up how the idea developed. The earliest scripture uses Sheol, a dim and silent holding place for all the dead, righteous and wicked alike. Judgment enters in the Second Temple period, and Daniel 12:2 is the closest the Old Testament comes to differentiated fates: some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt. In the New Testament the word is Gehenna, a transliteration of the name of a valley near Jerusalem associated with child sacrifice to Moloch, which became a symbol of judgment and defilement. Hades, Tartarus, and the lake of fire also appear. Charlie observed that Christianity today has no unified view of what hell actually is, and gave his own: as a parent who loves his children, he wants them to suffer the natural consequences of their behavior and no more, and he trusts that God, who is better than he is, will do exactly as much as is needed to make souls his and no more. He does not believe that there is an eternal lake of fire.

Michael responded to each term in turn. A dim, silent holding place sounds like a place he would enjoy. Shame is universal, since whoever one is, someone will shame him, and he regards the shame of those whose opinion he does not respect as entertainment. A lake one is thrown into is only hell if one is prevented from drowning. He asked how God would maximize pain beyond what the Inquisition devised, given that the Inquisition eventually ran out of the victim’s capacity to survive. Charlie said that if he were God, he would never send Michael to hell because Michael would enjoy it too much, and proposed a giant library with no books; Michael recognized the Twilight Zone episode in which a man who wants only to read survives a nuclear war, finds the library intact, and breaks his glasses.

Hell as self-banishment. Leonard offered his own view. We make our own hells. God does not assign people to them; he tries to describe them in scripture, in language of fire and brimstone because the reality is foreign to us, but the place is one we choose, as we chose to come here. Hell is the inability to endure the presence of God because of the guilt of what one has done. Christ paid the price of sin so that we need not suffer as he did; those who reject that payment must suffer as he did, in the eternities, and that is hell: the diametric opposite of the glory, peace, and love of God’s presence. In his theology, there was a war in heaven; Lucifer rebelled to gain the Father’s glory, and a third of the host went with him; they were not so much cast out as they left, thinking they could do it on their own. The deception is so complete that their hell is their heaven. A person who learns of Christ in this life and rebels against him will, when brought back into God’s presence, see the difference, feel an unbearable guilt, and banish himself to where misery loves company. That is the justice of the universe.

Michael accepted the premise that we make our own hells and quoted Thomas Paine: our tragedy is heightened because we furnish the means by which we suffer. On guilt, he said the cure is atonement, which Christianity, Islam, and much psychology agree on. He described his own method: examine what you can do to fix what you broke, and do it, including calling someone to clarify a remark that could have been taken as cruel. He contrasted this with the Christian method of trusting Christ to take care of one’s sins, and said both have merit depending on the paradigm. He then raised the case that does not fit: the person who does wrong and glories in it. Hitler did not experience his crimes as self-inflicted pain. Leonard answered that the self-inflicted pain comes at the judgment, not in this life, when one faces God and sees what one has done; he added that he had recently read a claim that Hitler said a demon possessed him.

Demons, insanity, and accountability. Michael said he has never met an angel or a demon and is unfamiliar with the distinctions between them. Leonard said he does not need to meet one; one can see living demons by looking at the world, and he cited a recent case in which a mother killed her children and a single holdout juror refused to accept an insanity defense. He called that juror righteous: one cannot say “I lost my mind” and be innocent, and she was not brought into court in a straitjacket. Michael distinguished insanity from disease. A person with rabies has nothing left of himself; what does that say about the soul? A person who is simply unhinged is a different case, and he set no lower limit on how far a person’s intelligence can fall. Leonard held that there is no excuse for killing one’s children, that the act requires a response, and that most broken laws, physical and spiritual, can be repaired through the atonement, but not without repentance.

Leonard read from Doctrine and Covenants 19, in which the Lord commands repentance on pain of a suffering whose severity is unknown to us, and says that he, God, suffered these things for all so that they might not suffer if they repent, a suffering that caused him to tremble, bleed at every pore, and wish not to drink the bitter cup. Leonard’s summary: repentance is coming to understand what one has done, not doing it again, and repairing what can be repaired; God has provided an off-ramp in his Son; the only place one can change is in this life; and God does not trifle with men’s souls. Michael said he agreed with that definition of repentance. He compared his stroke with the crucifixion, reasoning that the nails would have produced cycles of agony rather than his own four days of undifferentiated pain. Leonard replied that in the Mormon reading, the Atonement has two parts: the spiritual suffering in Gethsemane, which he has recently come to understand the disciples did not sleep through but fainted from witnessing, and the physical suffering on the cross.

A hypothetical and a scripture. Michael posed a case: a slave owner enters a cabin to rape a woman, her husband stands up, the owner kills the husband, and the woman kills the owner. Has she sinned against the Bible and the law and earned hell? Leonard said self-defense and retribution are different matters; Charlie called the case contrived; Michael insisted such things happened in slavery. Michael said at first that Jesus would tell her to let him rape her rather than kill him, then withdrew that and said Jesus would say, “Don’t kill him,” which does not mean submitting, and see what happens. Leonard concluded that her killing the owner was self-defense and justified, while the owner’s killing of the husband was murder. He then told the opening story of the Book of Mormon, in which Nephi, commanded to obtain the brass plates from Laban, finds Laban drunk in the street, is told by the Lord to kill him, does so with Laban’s own sword despite never having killed a man, impersonates him to obtain the record, and takes the servant Zoram by oath. Leonard’s point was that obedience can sometimes trump virtue. Michael said he had a thousand questions about that story but had to leave.

A parting question. Isak, leaving as well, asked whether hell might be a metaphor for the burning off of a human life, the decomposition of the body into whatever material it becomes, and whether that material is collected and gathered back into the fold. Leonard replied that the body decomposes but the spirit does not, so the spirit must go somewhere, and hides itself from the pain of God’s presence in a place of no glory. Very few go there. In his theology, there are degrees of glory: celestial, where the Father is; terrestrial, where Christ is; and telestial, which is similar to this world, with good and evil mixed, and where most people end up, apart from God as we are here, with God in the heart but not in his presence. Hell may likewise have levels, where those who rejected the atonement pay for their own sins. Charlie remarked that he never thinks about hell, and Leonard said there is no need to.

3. The process of knowing what is true

What the essay did for its author. Thomas asked Charlie what he had taken from preparing the essay, and Charlie said he assembled it by putting questions to an AI, one leading to another. His answer was that Mormonism had given him a simplified and controlled process for discovering truth: if the prophet says so, it is; and if reading the Book of Mormon produces a burning in the bosom, that is the sign of truth. Neither, he said, is a viable truth detector. The actual process is slower, more thoughtful, and more complex, and the Quaker practice in particular, with its clearness committees and the example of John Woolman, is rational, patient, and communal. This is the opposite of the top-down authority he was raised under, which is not merely what the prophet says but what the latest prophet says, and which he finds oppressive. He gave an example of the process at work: a video by a Bible scholar on the apparent conflict between Jesus’s words about the law standing until heaven and earth pass and Paul’s teaching on the law had led him, for the first time, to consider that Christians might still be under the Torah. Susan had cautioned him not to be hasty but slow, prayerful, and deliberate, since such a conclusion would change a life. Susan noted that Jesus said he came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17), and that Charlie was reporting a scholar’s synthesis rather than Jesus’s words; Charlie agreed the question deserved its own meeting.

The Quaker approach. Armond said he was drawn to the Quaker method because we are human, have egos, and are acted on by many powers. Beginning by looking within, testing whether an impulse is of the ego, looking for the absence of self-will, and testing against scripture all seemed to him ways of getting one’s reliance on self out of the way. The clearness committee, in which a private leading is submitted to a small group for patient questioning, struck him as a sound concept.

A case of testing a leading. Susan told a story that fits the tests, though not the communal form. After COVID, she and Charlie were far behind on rent, and the property manager called to ask when payments would resume. Susan prayed, and the answer she received was, “Tell her that I will provide.” She did not act on it. She sat with it for three or four days, asking God to confirm it, aware that Satan or her own wishful thinking could produce such words, and waited to see whether it would fade or be replaced. It did not. She then wrote to the manager and felt the Spirit help with the words. The manager called at once, said she had known many people of faith whose faith did not pay the rent, and pressed her to be realistic. Susan found a boldness she could not account for and pushed back, and at the end the manager said the one thing she could not argue with was God, and asked for a payment plan. Neither Susan nor Charlie knew how they would meet it. Shortly afterward, Charlie and Thomas made a financial arrangement, and the first payment was met on time; the contract was completed. Susan’s indicators were the felt presence of the Spirit while writing and speaking, and the fruit. She stressed that the waiting mattered: had she acted on the first impression as if it were certainly God’s, she believes the outcome would have been different and not good. Charlie summarized the method as testing by waiting, by feeling, by study, by conversation, and by fruit, and contrasted it again with the tradition in which the thinking has been done and one need only obey.

The host’s framing. Thomas said the Federal Rules of Evidence were new to him but read as common sense set down in writing. The real question for him was the one the group has circled for a year and a half: how do we know the Bible is true, how do we know that an impression such as Susan’s is from God, and, in the standing conversation between Mormonism and Christianity, how do we know which record to trust. He mentioned that he transcribed and wrote up an interview with a Jordanian Muslim who became a Christian, which he intends to send out, and noted that the Quran presents a comparison different in kind from the Book of Mormon, which reads more like backstory.

He then set out the comparison as he sees it. The restorationist argument, as he understands it and as Denver Snuffer’s lectures presented it, is that the Bible has been corrupted and cannot be primary, so that new revelation is required. Against this, the Bible was copied many times, but the surviving manuscripts, dispersed across regions and centuries, have been compared and agree closely; the variants are minor and change no doctrine. The four Gospels are four witnesses whose accounts triangulate on the same events, and that triangulation is the standard method by which Christendom has validated the record. The Book of Mormon, by contrast, rests on one man’s testimony, dictated by a method that included a hat and a seer stone, with no plates available for examination. Those are the two bodies of evidence, and the question is which is more authentic and more trustworthy: the apostolic record copied with minor errors, or the record Joseph Smith produced by the means he described.

The reply from the restorationist side. Leonard said the restoration had nothing to do with the Bible being bad. The Bible was fine; men corrupted the teaching and added their own philosophies, and what was restored was belief in the Bible, after which God, as he always does, added more. Joseph Smith preached from the Bible. The additional record came from the same roots: an Israelite people of the house of Joseph, the other sheep Christ said he must also visit (John 10:16). Asked in effect whether the Book of Mormon is more correct than the Bible, Leonard said he does not care; he loves all of it, and the more one can receive from God the better. Ranking one against the other is a mousetrap Satan sets. On the hat and seer stone, he said that is hearsay, and cited the rules of evidence against it; Joseph used an instrument that came with the record, which he called the Urim and Thummim, and eventually needed no instrument. He noted that each author in the Book of Mormon has a distinct word pattern, and that the Bible’s originals are no more available than the plates. None of this, he said, is what really matters. What matters is whether it is true, and the only way to know is to test it. God’s method is to understand a principle, believe it provisionally, obey it, and receive the blessing that follows; the blessing confirms the principle, faith becomes knowledge, and the cycle repeats until, in the end, the Lord manifests himself, though few reach that point. Spiritual things require spiritual tools; God does not honor “show me a sign.” If one refuses to test, that is a choice not to know.

Testing what, exactly? Susan said she agrees entirely with testing by obedience, which Charlie identified as the fruit test. She then asked for an example: is there a commandment in the Book of Mormon or the Doctrine and Covenants, not found in the Bible, that a person could test by obeying it this month? Leonard first named doctrines such as the three degrees of glory, which he said are tested by prayer, since the Book of Mormon’s own instruction is simply to ask God. Susan pressed for something to do. Leonard offered baptism, which most Christians do not consider necessary; Susan replied that many do, and that baptism is in the Bible. Leonard could not name a commandment unique to the additional scripture, and said that everything can be tested one way or another, by obeying it or by asking God through the Holy Ghost. Charlie observed that this is where the difficulty lies: when an idea comes, it is very hard to know whether it is God’s Spirit, one’s own ambition, or one’s own creativity. Leonard’s reply was that Charlie thinks too much, which Charlie took as a fair objection. Charlie added that his first wife believed every thought she had was true, and that if everything that enters one’s head is taken for God’s Spirit, one is headed for hell.

Spiritual experience is not evidence of doctrine. Susan made the comment she regarded as most important. When she was LDS, her spiritual experiences carried great weight as evidence that what she believed was true, including that her church was the true church. Leonard said he hates that use of them. Susan’s lesson is that one can have spiritual experiences and still not be believing the truth, because anyone who sincerely believes in Jesus, across many denominations, will have such experiences; they are common, and it is common to take them as confirmation of whatever doctrine one holds, but they are not an accurate test. She agreed with Leonard that one should pray and ask God, and read James 1:5-7 in the New Living Translation, which she prefers here to the King James: when you ask, be sure your faith is in God alone; a person of divided loyalty is like a wave tossed by the wind and should not expect to receive anything. J. B. Phillips renders it as asking without secret doubts about whether one really wants God’s help. She used to read the passage as a demand for enough belief that the request would be granted. She now reads it as a question about the heart: Is your faith in God? Do you really want to hear whatever he says, and are you willing to obey it even when it is not what you wanted? Discernment, wisdom, and understanding are gifts from God; attempted by one’s own power, they end in deception. The tools in Charlie’s essay are good tools, but they work only on that foundation. She added that this was not aimed at Leonard, whom she regards as a sincere believer who wants to obey, but at the premise that all of them should check before using any of the tools.

Leonard said he believed everyone present had experienced the hand of God and knew it, which is why they gather, and that it is a kind of miracle the group can discuss these things without anger. God will reveal truth to the heart; ask, seek, knock; and do not limit him, who is as vast as the ocean while we are a droplet. He recommended that anyone who chooses to read the Book of Mormon use the modern-language Covenant of Christ edition, and said he loves the various Bible translations because their makers strove to give us a record we can understand.

4. Closing

Susan closed in prayer, asking that the group be taught how to discern what is true and have experiences this week in which they learn it. Afterward, Leonard observed that “What is truth?” was Pilate’s question to Christ, asked while Truth stood in front of him, and that we likewise speak to the Lord and fail to recognize him when he answers. Susan added that Jesus identified himself as the truth: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38

260904 – The Promise of the Changed Heart

by Thomas Abshier | Sep 6, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Dear Fellowship: This week we have a treat. Susan wrote an essay for the Fellowship Meeting. (See below.)

Susan’s story is compelling because she testifies of a changed heart after submitting her life to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I think she has identified the most important aspect of the conversion/born again/salvation experience. For me, as a youth, going to church focused on accepting Jesus as my Savior to go to Heaven. We were taught about the transformation of our hearts, but Susan’s story brings that part of salvation to the forefront. Many people may not see the need to transform their hearts, so they see no urgency or benefit in this claim. Nevertheless, I think we should share this because we live in this body every day, feeling our hearts and minds. If we, by the Salvation experience, change from a person who is motivated by the approach and avoidance of the passions of our animal nature, and God changes our hearts, and we are able to incorporate the gifts of the Spirit, then our experience of life is better, regardless of what experience we may have in the afterlife. If we focus on living in God’s Spirit, we will be more likely to choose good and Godly acts in this complex life we live in.

Thomas

Why Seek The God of the Bible?
(For those who do not believe)

By Susan Gutierrez – 9/4/2026

This is a challenge from me to anyone who does not believe in Christ. In this short presentation, I set forth one good reason to find out for yourself whether the God of the Bible is real and willing to have a relationship with you.

Here is a little background on me: I was raised to believe in Christ, but I rejected Christ and the Bible in my mid-twenties, coming back to Christ maybe 15-17 years later.  During the years that I did not believe in Christ, I became very focused on trying to find a solution for the terrible crime and wrongdoings that people do to each other. I thought there must be some way to motivate people to choose to do right. I didn’t imagine it would have anything to do with God, though. During those years, I had not yet found a solution.

Years later, I returned to a belief in Christ after 4 months of diligent prayer and daily Bible reading. I had intellectually come to believe that the Son of God was born of a mortal woman, lived a life in obedience to God the Father, was without sin, was tempted, persecuted, accused, tortured, and was crucified without a just cause, and rose the third day. I had come to believe that he died for our sins and if we believe in him, we will be saved on judgment day. I did not expect major changes in my heart. I was shocked to find that the day of, or the day after, I was filled with the most beautiful joy, peace, and love for God.

I kept reading and eventually found verses that explained to me what had happened to me. Like these next Bible passages:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance: against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)

I realized that I had been filled with those first three fruits of the Spirit. And those fruits of the Spirit are still with me. By the way. I also recognized the description of these verses:

Therefore, if anyone be in Christ, he is a new creation: old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. —2 Corinthians 5:17 (NKJV)

 Jesus answered and said to him, Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.—John 3:3 (NKJV)

He restores my soul, He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake. —Psalm 23:3 (NKJV)

I did and still do feel like I became a new creation, and I feel like I was born again. I also feel like He leads me in paths of righteousness, though it is a challenge to follow His lead. I find it is really a process to learn how to follow Jesus, but my heart is so changed that I desire to follow Jesus.

I have listened to countless testimonies of ex-criminals, ex-addicts, and some who were in some kind of destructive lifestyle. These people have somehow, or otherwise, come to believe in Christ and have been changed, sometimes radically, and usually some changes came immediately. Do you find these and other testimonies compelling enough to look into this for yourself? My thinking is this: For anyone who would like to be able to do something to be part of a solution to the problems in this world,  wouldn’t it be worth spending the time to earnestly pray, read the Bible, and seek to discover if the people that testify that Christ has changed their hearts have really found the true God? Based on my own experience, I can tell you there is a true and living God who is willing and wanting to be in relationship with you. If you gain a relationship with the true and living God, I believe that relationship will be extremely meaningful to you, and you will be on the path to spreading this good news to people who desperately need God’s help. In fact, Christ makes it clear that he is inviting us to join him in his work in this passage, where he uses the analogy of a yoke, which is an instrument used in farming to “yoke” two animals together so they can plow a field together.  His work is saving souls. He is inviting as many people as will come to him to help him do his work. See these verses:

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart.: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.–Matthew 11:29 (KJV)

For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. — Luke 19:10 (NKJV)

Here is one more last idea. Have you ever felt loved so deeply by someone (like a grandparent or aunt, for example) that you could not help but love them back? That is what happens in a relationship with God. A woman goes to Jesus with an alabaster box of ointment. She washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiped the tears off with her hair. She kissed his feet and anointed them with oil. The man whose house they were in silently judged this woman because he knew that she was a sinner. Jesus recognized the man’s thoughts and asked him, “Who loves more?” One who has been forgiven much, or one who has been forgiven little? The man answered that it would be the one who had been forgiven much. Jesus affirmed that he was correct and then explained all the things this woman had done for him and the things the man had not done for him. She had been forgiven of so much sin, but as a result she loved Jesus so deeply. (See Luke 7:36-50) This is part of the great power of having a relationship with the true and living God. God fills those who earnestly seek him and find him with a precious love that makes the person love God back, and then they have enough love overflowing to love others!

We love him, because he first loved us.—1 John 4:19

By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.—John 13:35 (KJV)

Jesus helps us discern between people who are his true followers and those who just claim to believe in him, as shown in the previous scripture verse. This is so helpful because so many people turn away from Christ because of the unloving behavior of some who claim to believe in Christ.

You see, God loves us and wants us to come to him in relationship, and the love we receive from him is priceless; his love enables us to love others and to desire to tell others about this relationship that is possible for them to have as well. It is so beautiful, meaningful, helpful, and healing. Nearly every problem in this world can be helped by people getting into relationship with the true and living God!  Doesn’t that sound worth seeking for yourself? Here are three great testimonies. I hope you will at least watch one. There are so many more available on YouTube. I recommend Delafe testimonies, but they tend to be long.

Here is a link for a gang member who turned to Christ. He became a new creature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxroAZ8Hzcg&t=81s

Here is a link to a testimony of a doctor, an atheist, who started reading the Bible to discredit Christian neighbors and ended up believing in Christ and becoming a changed person. He and his wife explain how he has changed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtEZMgUHnRg

Here is a link for a testimony given by a former lesbian and lgbtq activist. She describes her process of believing her lifestyle was good to believing in Christ and repenting. This is a very intellectual, level-headed account of a conversion story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJc0McjBo3o

The Changed Heart

A Response to Susan’s Challenge

By Thomas – 9/6/2026

Susan’s essay illuminates the fact that most of us who grew up in church were taught salvation as a transaction with a future payoff: believe in Jesus, and you will go to Heaven when you die. We were taught about a changed heart, but it seemed out of reach or abstract. How is that done? Susan did not expect her heart to change; she had done the intellectual work of coming to believe the claims about Christ, and she assumed that was it. Then, within a day, she was filled with joy, peace, and love for God, and she has carried that for years since. She believed, but it was more than a new belief; she noticed a dramatic transformation. I think she has experienced what is available from the salvation relationship.

The heart we are born with

To see why this matters, it helps to be honest about the heart we start with. We are born as creatures of approach and avoidance. We move toward what feels good and away from what feels bad. Hunger, fear, desire, pride, the wish to be admired, the sting of being slighted, the pull of comfort, the dread of loss: these are the drives of the natural life. They are not evil in themselves. They kept our ancestors alive, and they keep us alive. But they are blind. They do not know the difference between the good and the merely pleasant, or between the harmful and the merely painful. An animal nature can be trained, and it can be restrained, but it cannot be made good, because goodness is the property of God.

Susan spent years of her unbelieving life looking for a way to motivate people to do right. That is the oldest problem in ethics, and I think she could not solve it because the tools available to an unbeliever are all external. Law tells you what to do. Punishment makes the wrong more painful. Reward makes the right more pleasant. Education informs the mind. All of these operate on the surface of the same human value system, adjusting the inputs of approach and avoidance without touching the heart itself. Paul describes the result exactly: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19). Knowing the right and wanting to do it are not the same thing as being able to want it more than you want everything else.

What conversion actually changes

Here is what I think Susan’s testimony, and the many testimonies she has listened to, are describing. Conversion does not remove the animal nature. The appetites and fears are still there, and every believer knows it. Conversion installs a new governing desire above them. The fruit of the Spirit that Susan quotes—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance—is not a list of behaviors to perform. It describes what a heart wants when God’s Spirit lives in it. Love is the first fruit for a reason. A person who loves does not need to be commanded to be kind; kindness is what love does. A person at peace does not need to be restrained from grasping; the grasping has lost its urgency.

And this new desire is not manufactured. That is the point of the woman with the alabaster box. She did not decide to love Jesus as a discipline. She loved him because she had been forgiven, and she knew the size of what she had been forgiven. “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Love is received before it is given. This is why exhortation fails and encounter succeeds. You cannot argue a person into loving; you can only bring them to the One who loves them, and let them find out for themselves.

Why this matters today, not only in the afterlife

We live inside our own hearts every waking hour. Whatever we believe about the life to come, the quality of this life is the quality of the heart we carry through it. A heart governed by fear experiences the world as a threat. A heart governed by appetite experiences it as scarcity. A heart governed by pride experiences every other person as a rival or a judge. Such a heart can have money, health, and success, and still be miserable, because misery is what those desires produce when they run unchecked.

A heart filled with love, joy, and peace experiences the same circumstances differently. The bills are still there, the body still ages, the people are still difficult, but the inner weather has changed. This is not a promise of an easy life. It promises a different way of being inside a hard one. And it is a benefit that begins the day it is received, as Susan found. Nobody has to wait until death to collect it.

As a physician, most of what people bring to me are symptoms, and most symptoms have a root. The crime and cruelty that troubled Susan in her unbelieving years are symptoms. The root is a heart that wants the wrong things, or wants the right things too weakly. You can treat symptoms forever. Only changing the root changes the patient.

Choosing good in a complex life

None of this means that a converted heart is handed a rulebook. Life is complicated. The situations we face at work, in families, in this Fellowship, rarely come with a verse attached. What the changed heart provides is not a map but a compass. When love is the governing desire, the thousand small decisions of a day lean toward good without deliberation, and the hard decisions are approached from the right direction. Character precedes choice. This is what it means to be led in paths of righteousness: not to be told each step, but to have become the kind of person who wants to walk that way.

The honesty of Susan’s challenge

I want to close by defending Susan’s challenge. She is not asking the unbeliever to accept anything on her say-so. She points to evidence—her own life and the lives of the people whose testimonies she has gathered—and invites the skeptic to run the experiment: pray earnestly, read the Bible daily, and seek. That is what she did for four months. The cost is time and the effort of sincerely trying to accept the truth of the Bible’s story about who Christ is. The potential return is a changed heart and a changed life. Any honest person who claims to want the world to be better ought to at least be willing to test the one remedy that so many witnesses report has worked.

Questions for our discussion

1. When you think back on your own conversion, was the change in your heart something you expected, or something that surprised you as it did Susan?
2. Where in your life does the old engine of approach and avoidance still run the show, and what has it looked like when the Spirit’s governing desire took over instead?
3. If a skeptic in your life accepted Susan’s challenge and asked you how to begin, what would you tell them?
4. How do we, as a Fellowship, make the changed heart visible, so that the “unloving behavior” Susan mentions is not what people see when they look at us?

Real but Not True

Reflections on Rosaria Butterfield’s Testimony

By Thomas – 9/6/2026

This is the third of the three testimonies Susan attached to her essay. Rosaria was not a lost soul looking for meaning. She was a tenured professor, a feminist and LGBTQ activist who spoke at pride rallies, testified before the New York legislature, and, by her own account, taught thousands of students to hate the Bible. She opened the Bible as an atheist, and only in order to write a book explaining why Christians would not leave people like her alone. If a changed heart can happen there, it can happen anywhere. What follows are five things I think her story adds to Susan’s challenge.

1. The Word of God works on a hostile reader

Rosaria did not pray for help. She read the Bible as a cultural document, expecting misogyny and superstition, and instead she found it making claims on her. Her first reaction was outrage: who has the right to say that I must repent? She notes, rightly, that if the Bible were merely a human book, that outrage would be justified. But she kept reading, and the words began to work on her in spite of her intentions. This is the claim of Hebrews 4:12, the passage that she says undid her: the Word of God is living, and it discerns “the thoughts and intents of the heart.” The Bible knew her better than she knew herself. She could not tolerate that intimacy as an enemy; she could only tolerate it by going all the way across to the Jesus who offers rest. Susan’s challenge to the skeptic was to read the Bible earnestly. Rosaria’s story shows that even a skeptic who reads it in hostility is not safe from it.

2. Non-transactional love

The human instrument in Rosaria’s conversion was a pastor named Ken Smith and his wife Floy. Ken did not argue her into the Kingdom. He and Floy took her to dinner week after week for years. When she quit the project and tried to hand back the Bibles, Ken kept showing up at her door with a book or fresh bread. Rosaria says what made this powerful was the contrast with the rest of her life, where relationships were transactional. The Smiths wanted nothing from her. They loved her as an enemy of God because God had told them to, and they did not consider God finished with her until she became His friend.

This is the point in our first essay made flesh: love is received before it can be given. Rosaria did not first decide to love God. She was loved, persistently and without conditions, by two Christians who were the nearest visible form of God’s love she could see. Susan’s essay warned that many people turn away from Christ because of the unloving behavior of those who claim Him. Ken and Floy are the other side of that coin.

3. Real but not true

The crux of Rosaria’s struggle was the one every person with a deeply held identity faces: how do you repent of a sin that is who you are? She had built her whole self on her sexuality, and the Bible was telling her to repent of it. She saw the trap precisely: when your identity is the sin, you become the sacrificial lamb, and there is no room for Jesus to be the lamb instead.

Ken’s answer was simple and, I think, profound: perhaps it is a false identity. It is real; your girlfriend can confirm that. But is it true? He took her to Romans 7, where Paul says, “Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me” (Romans 7:17). The lesbianism was real, but it was not her. It was sin dwelling in her, and Jesus was waiting on the other side of it. This is the same distinction I tried to draw in my last essay between the animal engine we are born with and the person God made us to be. Our desires are real. They are not the last word on who we are.

Whatever a person’s particular struggle, this distinction is the door out of despair. You cannot hate yourself, because God loves you. You must hate your sin, because Christ died to free you from it. Those two are only compatible if you and your sin are not the same thing.

4. Nobody flipped a switch

Rosaria’s story differs from Susan’s in an important way. Susan was filled with joy, peace, and love within a day. Rosaria says plainly that no one flipped a switch in her, that her old desires did not vanish overnight, and that the Christian life is rugged, “feet on the floor.” Conversion took years of dinners, arguments, and reading before she could say she was a Christian. Repentance came first; sanctification, the growing to be like Jesus, is a lifelong work.

Both testimonies are true, and together they are a more complete picture than either alone. The changed heart is a change in what the heart wants, in its governing desire and its direction. It is not always a change in what the heart feels on any given day. Some are given the joy at once; others are given the desire to walk toward it and must walk. What both women share is that the direction of the will changed, and stayed changed.

5. You must go one way or the other

The moment of decision came when her partner found her praying and reading the Bible, and berated her for it. Rosaria realized she had become a closet Christian in an out gay life, and that she could not stay in the middle of the intersection. Everyone has to go one direction or the other: Jesus, or not Jesus. Jesus wants exclusive rights to His people because He bought them.

This matters because our culture prefers to keep faith as one option among many. Rosaria’s story insists it is not. A faith that asks nothing exclusive of you is not the faith of the Bible. But she also says what makes the exclusivity bearable: it is the one relationship you cannot sabotage. He will never leave you nor forsake you.

Questions for our discussion

1. Rosaria’s conversion depended on a pastor who kept showing up at her door after she told him she was done. Who in your life is the person you have been tempted to write off as finished with God?
2. “Real but not true.” Where have you had to make that distinction in your own life, about a desire, a habit, or an identity?
3. Susan’s heart changed in a day; Rosaria’s changed over years and is still changing. Which pattern is closer to your own, and how do we avoid making either one the required standard for everyone?
4. What does it look like, practically, for this Fellowship to offer the kind of non-transactional love that Ken and Floy offered?

What More Could There Be?

Reflections on Dr. Greg Viehman’s Testimony

By Thomas – 9/6/2026

The second testimony Susan attached demonstrates the difference between believing the Gospel and being changed by it, because he did the first without the second for a while, and knew exactly what each felt like. If Rosaria’s testimony shows the changed heart from its hardest starting point, Greg’s shows it from its most respectable one: a successful, intelligent man who had every reason to think he was fine.

The engine running at full throttle

Greg describes his life before Christ as a sequence of acquisitions. A new car; when that did not do it, clothes; then a trip; then hobbies, triathlons, running, wine. Each was supposed to produce the fulfillment his career had promised and not delivered. Underneath was sadness and emptiness, mixed with anger that he could not explain, and embarrassment that kept him from telling anyone. So he took it out on others. His wife Ruth’s description is blunt: good, but a short fuse, arrogant, always right, always number one.

This is the approach-and-avoidance drive of our first essay running exactly as designed, in a man who had won every race it set him. The lesson is worth pausing on. The natural heart does not become satisfied by succeeding; it becomes more frantic, because every success proves that the next one will not work either. Greg had run the experiment for a lifetime and had the result.

Belief without change

Greg opened the Bible for the same reason Rosaria did: to use it against Christians. His neighbors had, he thought, snubbed his family, and he intended to prove they were not practicing what they preached. What stopped him was the discovery that Jesus claimed to be God in the flesh. Greg saw immediately that this was either the most important event in history or a fairy tale, and as a scientist he could not leave that question open. He spent weeks on the resurrection, going through every alternative, and found that none of them held together. The swoon theory failed; even the Journal of the American Medical Association had concluded that Jesus died. The stolen body and hallucination theories could not account for the guards, the empty tomb, or the disciples’ transformed lives. What finished it for him was Paul, a Jew killing Christians with nothing to gain, who became the greatest evangelist in history. There was only one explanation: he saw the risen Lord. Greg concluded that he had to believe it.

Having accepted that Christ rose, Greg summarized what he now thought Christianity was: it really happened, and if you believe, go to church, and try to do the right thing, then when you die you go to heaven. And he asked, “What more could there be?”

That is the transactional Gospel, stated by a man who had arrived at it by honest reasoning. He had the doctrine correct. He had the historical evidence in order. And nothing in him had changed. He was still angry, still frustrated, still unable to fix what he knew was wrong with himself. Belief, by itself, had left him untouched.

The visitor

What broke the deadlock was not another argument. A walk-in patient looked him in the eye and asked whether he had accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. Greg nearly passed out and bolted from the room. Days later, alone with the things in his life he wanted to change and had no power to change, he broke down, asked God’s forgiveness, repented, and asked to be made new.

When he went looking for the patient afterward, the handwritten name was gone from the schedule, and there was no record that he had ever been in the office. Ruth had been praying for years and had just told God she gave up, and He would have to do something. Hebrews 13:2 says some have “entertained angels unawares.” Whatever the visitor was, he asked the one question that Greg’s research had not, and it was the question that mattered.

The physician checks his medicine cabinet

The next morning Greg woke up peaceful. No frustration, no anger, content for no reason. He expected it to wear off, and it did not. Then he did something: he reasoned that if he felt completely different, something in his biochemistry must have changed, so he checked whether his antihistamine had somehow been switched for a tranquilizer. It had not.

Greg wouldn’t believe a feeling; he’d rule out the mundane explanations first. When he had ruled them out, he went to the Bible for the remaining one and found it in Romans 6: the old man dies when the Spirit comes in, cross-referenced to Galatians 5:22, the fruit of the Spirit. His reaction was the same as Susan’s: that is the list; that is how I feel. Three witnesses, Susan, Greg, and Rosaria, converged independently on the same passage to explain what had happened to them.

Whatever the mechanism, a change in a man’s baseline emotional state that arrives overnight and persists for decades is a real event in a real body. It is not a metaphor. Greg is right that something changed in him, and it is entirely reasonable to want to know what. The Bible’s answer is that a Person took up residence.

The proof is the changed life

Ruth says she feels married to a different man, and that her old husband is no longer around. He was suddenly concerned about other people, which shocked her. That is the fruit of the Spirit observed from the outside.

Greg himself says that while he has no doubt the resurrection is true, the real proof is his changed life, and he offers the same challenge Susan does: call on Christ and put Him to the test. He will not only forgive your sins; He will change you now, so that you know it is true. Greg summarizes the difference between Christianity and everything else as this: every other religion is man seeking God; Christianity is God seeking man.

Questions for our discussion

1. Greg had the doctrine right and the evidence in order before anything in him changed. Have you known believers, or been one, in that condition? What moved you from believing to being changed?
2. Greg had to reach the point of admitting he could not change himself before he asked God to. Why is that admission so hard for capable people, and what does it look like to help someone reach it?
3. Ruth’s testimony is that she is married to a different man. If our spouses, children, or coworkers were asked whether we have been changed, what would they say?
4. Greg checked his medicine cabinet before he checked the Bible. What is the right role of that kind of skepticism in a believer, and where does it become a way of refusing what God is doing?

Belief, Confession, and the Changed Heart

Fellowship Discussion Recap – September 6, 2026

The meeting took up Susan’s written testimony and three recorded testimonies she had attached to it: a former gang member, a physician who had been an atheist, and a former lesbian activist and professor. The discussion moved from the common structure of those four conversions to questions about the nature of salvation, the existence and place of Satan, what heaven and hell consist of, how eternity might be spent, the authority of scripture relative to other claimed revelation, and how the group should understand the differences among its members’ traditions. This essay collects the points made and the responses given.

1. The common structure of the four testimonies

Thomas opened by summarizing the three recorded testimonies and identifying what he saw as the common thread among all four. In each case, the person first accepted the factual claims of the Gospel as true: that Jesus was born of a woman, was from God, lived without sin, was crucified unjustly, rose from the dead, ascended, and is God. The change of heart came after that acceptance, not before it and not as a condition of it.

Susan had described this sequence in the sharpest form. After four months of daily prayer and Bible reading, she reached an intellectual conviction that the claims were true. She expected nothing further from that conviction. The following day she found herself filled with joy, peace, and love for God, and she later found in Galatians 5:22-23 the description of what had happened to her. The physician’s account followed the same pattern: weeks of examining the evidence for the resurrection, a conclusion that it must have happened, and a period in which he believed the doctrine but remained unchanged, until he asked God to change him and woke the next morning at peace. The former activist’s account differed in that her transformation was gradual, and she reported that her old desires did not vanish; Susan had included her account for exactly that reason, so that the presentation would not suggest that conversion always removes the struggle.

Thomas connected this pattern to Romans 10:9: “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” He said he had struggled with what it could mean to be saved by believing a fact, and that the four testimonies served as a case study for answering the question. The verse names two elements: belief in the resurrection and confession of Jesus as Lord. Susan confirmed that both were present in her experience: she had prayed alone, repented, and confessed her belief in Christ, and was baptized within the following year. She agreed to add that detail to the written version. Thomas concluded that the testimonies establish what salvation requires and what can be expected from it. Belief in the fact of the resurrection and confession of Christ as Lord constitute salvation; sanctification, the learning to live it, follows and may involve continuing work.

Susan later qualified the contrast between overnight and gradual change. In her experience, and in the testimonies she has listened to, some things change immediately, and others require continued effort. She suggested that the former activist, who emphasized the ongoing struggle, almost certainly also experienced immediate changes she did not describe. The common element across both patterns is that the person now wants to please God. She compared it to being loved by a grandparent: one does not have to try to love such a person back, and one does not want to disrespect them. Thomas added that the difficulty of staying on the path in this life may reflect how easily Satan reaches the heart in a world that is, in some sense, his kingdom, and Susan agreed that distraction from the path continues after salvation and must be met with prayer.

2. Michael’s questions

Michael, who does not identify as a Christian, takes notes when others talk and raises several questions in sequence.

Literal belief and the Levitical law. Michael observed that claiming the Bible is real is one thing and claiming the whole of it is literally real is another; if the latter, where is the goat’s blood, and why does no one perform the rituals of Leviticus? Susan answered that the sacrificial system belonged to the first covenant and foreshadowed what was to come. Christ, being without sin and killed unjustly, deserved to live, and God raised him from the dead; Satan overstepped his bounds by inspiring the death of a just man, and Christ thereby gained authority over him. The Father accepts Christ’s sacrifice in place of the death each person deserves, and once a person trusts in Christ and makes him Lord, Christ shepherds him in paths of righteousness, as Psalm 23 describes.

Relativism and the question of truth. Michael noted that the former activist’s original position, that what is real for a person is real for that person, resembles the way a Mormon and a Lutheran might each concede the other’s beliefs are “real for them.” He also observed, without criticism, that Thomas’s own life had passed through several complete transformations, each believed at the time, and asked how one knows which was true. Thomas accepted that this is the central question and that it is not trivial. He returned to it later in the meeting in the context of scriptural authority.

Satan and eternal existence. Michael asked whether Satan lives forever and whether he can die. Susan distinguished between eternal existence and eternal life. Scripture defines eternal life as relationship: “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). Satan exists but is cut off; Jesus says Satan has no part in him, so he is without love and without light. The group agreed that Satan lives forever, as do all persons, and that the difference between the saved and the lost is not duration of existence but fellowship with the Father and the Son.

How Satan can be outside a God who is everything. Michael pressed Thomas’s stated view that all things are in God: if Satan is cut off from God, then either God is not everything or there is something beyond everything. Susan said she had come to think Thomas’s view is supported by many verses but did not have an answer for how Satan fits, and offered only the image of a bubble within God that his light does not reach. Thomas proposed a different resolution using the model the group has developed in earlier discussions. The Father created the Son; the Son created all things (John 1:3: “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made”); the Father relates to the Son, who is perfect, and the Son’s creation contains the evil that the Father does not embrace, in the way one sees a person’s outward conduct without seeing his inner thoughts. On that model, when Satan rebelled and was cast out, the only place to cast him was within the Son’s creation, under the Son’s authority. Susan agreed, noting that the Father placed Jesus in authority over everything in heaven and earth, which would include Satan. Thomas added that the temptation in the wilderness supports this: Satan offered Christ the kingdoms of the world, which he could not have offered unless the authority had been given to him, and Christ declined the offer rather than denying Satan’s right to make it. No bubble outside God is required; Satan is simply under Christ’s authority.

Who is with Satan, and what it is like. Michael asked whether other persons live forever with Satan or whether he is alone. Thomas answered that those who choose not to be in relationship with God through Christ are with Satan; God has a particular nature, and those who have not been purified do not fit into that fellowship. Michael then asked what either state is actually like, since the Hollywood images of harps and clouds are not credible, and whether hell is simply a bad feeling that persists. Susan offered an illustration she had used in teaching children: two doors, behind one of which people love one another, are kind, and are in good relationship, and behind the other of which are those who do harm, cannot be trusted, and have no love among them. Everyone, asked which they would choose, chooses the first. Heaven is a place with no death or sickness and no one purposely doing harm to another, though there may still be occasions for apology. She did not claim to know what its occupations are, only that they will be good and more satisfying than the harp image suggests.

A counter-account of happiness and darkness. Michael responded at length. He said he had lived among communities with and without trust and kindness and that people adapt to their absence. He does not trust himself, since he breaks his own rules constantly, and has learned to accept that. His own happiness does not depend on anything physical; he is grateful every day he can breathe, and reaches an exultant state most waking hours even in severe pain. He compared death to a raindrop landing in the ocean, still existing but part of something larger. Asked where his constant good state comes from, he had once answered, from a darkness far deeper than the light could know: a daily awareness that tens of thousands die of starvation, and of other horrors, keeps him from walking through life oblivious, and the darkness itself gives capacities the light alone cannot. A woman raped by her father now runs a rape crisis center and can meet victims with an understanding a person who had lived only in the light could not offer. He draws on his own darkness to reach people who need to change, since telling them they are simply wrong wins nothing. He cited the saying that the church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints, and said he lives by much of the Bible’s teaching.

Susan replied on two points. First, on the use of suffering, she cited Romans 8:28, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose,” and the passage in 2 Corinthians 1 in which those who have been comforted by God comfort others with the same comfort. Second, on Michael’s own state, she cited the description of Christ as the true light “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9). His concern for people getting along and loving one another, and his distress at Christians who fight one another, is that light in him, and he is obeying it. She suggested this may be why it is hard for him to distinguish believing in Christ from obeying Christ: he already has much of what Christ gives. But more is available: fuller guidance, use, and filling with joy, peace, and love, which comes with making Christ Lord. She asked him to pray daily, asking God to teach him what is true, and to read the Bible daily with that invitation. He thanked her for that request as he left.

3. Observations after Michael left

Armond offered that life with Christ and life without it seem to be a matter of intention. Being intentional allows one to experience heaven on earth and the full satisfaction of bliss, while acting without intention or in ungodly ways produces a persistent sense that something is missing. Susan agreed and added a qualification she wished she had made to Michael before he left: even a person following the light Christ has given him will still have that empty place until he is in relationship with the Father, and that relationship is received only through Christ.

Armond offered an analogy between animal and plant life. Animals live by predation, so that in that economy someone always loses; plants grow daily in two directions, thriving without killing what is around them. Susan and Charlie noted that invasive plant species also exist, and they do their killing in slow motion. The analogy was left as a picture of the difference between a life governed by appetite and one governed by growth.

Susan remarked that she had spent most of the week writing a conventional essay and discarded it, writing the testimony fresh on the day she sent it, because she judged that a story touches the heart in a way an essay does not. Thomas agreed: facts tell, stories sell, and the question of how a heart is won is exactly the question the testimony addressed.

4. Leonard’s perspective

Leonard, whose background is in a restorationist movement descended from Joseph Smith and who now belongs to a covenant Christian group associated with a living teacher, offered his perspective on several of the questions raised.

What is done in eternity. Leonard answered Michael’s earlier question directly: we do what God does. God’s work and glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man, and the redeemed will share in that work, perhaps at different levels, since there are many mansions. “Eternal” is a proper name for God in scripture, so eternal life is a God-like life, and the joy and fullness of it consist in doing what God does under his purview, as Christ did everything the Father commanded.

Choice. Leonard said the discussion had circled something Susan had named directly: choice. Cain chose, and what he chose was to follow Satan’s temptation to kill his brother and take what was his. Agency exists so that one can choose; opposition exists in all things for the same reason. On being asked whether the detail about Cain taking Abel’s possessions comes from the Bible or from his tradition’s scripture, he said it comes from his own scripture, that others need not believe it, and that Susan had also quoted two different Bibles. Thomas said he was only asking about the source, and Leonard replied that anyone is free to scrutinize what he says against the Bible.

Heaven and hell. Heaven is being in the presence of God; hell is being cut off from it. In a sense, all of us now live in hell, having been cut off from the Father’s presence by the transgression of Adam, though each person is accountable for his own sins rather than Adam’s. Thomas and Charlie responded that Jesus said the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21) and that believers are temples of the living God, so one can be in the presence of God now; Susan added that scripture also calls Satan the prince of this world, so that we are in his playground and yet can carry a relationship with the Father within us. Leonard accepted that we can experience heaven in this life through the influence of the Father and the Son, and that the spirit within us can become holy so that we are one with Christ, but maintained that we are not in the Father’s actual presence, which is what heaven is. The purpose of the separation is a test: whether we will choose to be with God, exercise faith, and do what he commands. God cannot tolerate sin, so he has provided his Son as the way back, whose work is to forgive sins and make us holy.

Leonard offered word studies on the adversary. Lucifer means light-bearer and was a high being who chose to place himself above the Father and demanded his glory; a third of the host of heaven followed him and was cast out to this realm. Satan is a title rather than a name, meaning accuser, which is why Christ could call Peter Satan when Peter opposed his going to Jerusalem. Damned means dammed, stopped like a river; those who chose that course are stopped and miserable forever, and wish all others to be as miserable as themselves. Everything outside the presence of God- all deception, darkness, and violence- is hell, and one can be in it in this life as well as after.

How large is Christ’s tent? Leonard said the first question that came to mind when he read the testimony was how large Christ’s tent is, and whether he, or anyone who believes as he does, fits under it. He described his group’s position: it accepts all faiths, its members remain in their own congregations, it has no institution, and does not require anyone to follow its teacher, who has said that a fool is one who follows him. It offers the doctrine of Christ, which it defines as faith, repentance, baptism, and the baptism of fire in the Holy Ghost. The group maintains its own scriptures because it is trying to recover what its predecessors lost when they rejected and killed the prophets and usurped their authority.

Susan answered the tent question. When a person believes in Christ, Christ covers him, and the Father’s blessings reach him through Christ. On that basis, one can be in the presence of God now, here, though not in person, and salvation, if defined as relationship with the Father, is available now rather than deferred to judgment day. She said the belief that salvation cannot happen now was one she had held as a Mormon and found restrictive. If Leonard believes that he is covered by Christ and in relationship with the Father now, then he is in the tent. Leonard said that the teaching that salvation is deferred is what his group calls unbelief, believing something that is not true, and that it contradicts the founder’s own teaching; he reported that the current president of the mainstream church had recently called the second comforter a tool of the devil.

Leonard then added to Susan’s account. Confession of belief is the first step, and salvation is a gift given when one awakes and turns to Christ. But one who believes Christ will believe his words and commandments, and the next step is baptism, which Christ himself underwent, though he did not need it, as a sign to his followers of the burial and rising that were to come. He noted the Greek of the voice at the baptism, “this day have I begotten thee,” softened in the King James rendering. After baptism there remains the matter of receiving from Christ the wedding garment that covers sin, so that the Father can be part of one’s life. Beyond that, he said, more has been revealed, and he loves and cannot deny it.

Susan responded that her testimony had not included what follows confession and probably should have, since it is a large matter; she named it sanctification. Leonard named it repentance, and observed that all three recorded converts had repented. The two agreed that repentance and sanctification go together: one goes on as a new, repented person, and Christ continually calls one to recognize further things to repent of and change. Leonard’s closing question was whether one is willing: whether the heart is changed enough to do everything Christ asks. Most people, he said, are content to stop earlier, and at least they have done that much.

The yoke. The group returned to the passage Susan had used, Matthew 11:29-30. Leonard’s reading was that the believer is on one side of the yoke and the Lord on the other, and the Lord takes all the weight, which is why the yoke is easy and the burden light. Susan agreed, adding that we still do some things, but he sustains us; what he asks is that we follow him.

Fear. Leonard remarked that everyone is afraid, including Christians, unless they give that fear over to the Lord, who is not here to condemn but to bless and lift up. Charlie objected that he was not afraid; Leonard insisted he was. Armond offered that the fear is not of disobedience or wrong choices but of death, and specifically of killing the version of oneself that one has known for so long. Leonard accepted this and added that if one trusts Christ, death can be sweet, since the old man can be buried and washed and come out clean. Thomas added that Christ promised to overcome the last enemy, death, and that this life might itself be what heaven is, lacking only the full presence of God; Leonard said he hoped not, and that joy is available in this life but not its fullness.

5. The authority of scripture and other revelation

Susan asked what Leonard would share if he were presenting the Gospel to someone who did not know it, and whether he would include the additional knowledge his group holds. Charlie, formerly a missionary in the mainstream church, described what he had taught: the gospel defined as faith, repentance, baptism by immersion, and the gift of the Holy Ghost, but always tied to the restoration, meaning the founder’s vision, the Book of Mormon, and the great apostasy, and noted that some four hundred groups have descended from the founder, all restorationist, which he finds confusing.

Thomas lays out his position on this material. The central question is whether the core claims are true: that Jesus died for sins, rose, lived sinlessly, was God and man, and that his death and resurrection accomplished something eternally significant. Discussions of heaven, of where Satan is, and the like serve to make that center understandable, and the restorationist tradition is, in its most benign form, another way of making the Gospel acceptable. His concern is with what is added. Much of that tradition’s sanctification consists of service and doing, attached to an authority who has heard from God and says what must and must not be done. He compared this to the Eastern path of devotion to a teacher who has seen God. The liberty of Christ, as Susan’s testimony displayed it, requires belief in a small set of claims and confession; the additional prophets, covenants, and rituals add to what must be done and can become a yoke placed on a person by other people and traditions, and he suggested this pattern has the look of a lighter form of the adversary’s religion. He acknowledged that Leonard would say his teacher demands nothing and only gives more light, and that he himself cannot judge whether any burden has been placed. He recalled Paul on circumcision: if one must be circumcised to have Christ, Christ profits nothing, since one has bound oneself to the whole law (Galatians 5:2-3).

On the epistemic question, he said he has no way to know whether other claimed revelations are true. The Bible is as close as one can get to the original source, the apostles who were there and recorded what they saw; that is the level of authority he gives it and nothing else. Someone who reports a vision or an angel might be reporting the truth or be Satan appearing as an angel of light to deceive; he cannot say it did not happen, since he was not there, and he can’t judge the spirit without confronting it directly. His rule is to put the Bible first and everything else second. If a claimed revelation contradicts the Bible, he goes with the Bible. If it does not, he cannot say it is false, but he treats it as secondary literature: on the bookshelf, not on the altar. He reads Shakespeare and gets something from it; he puts the Book of Mormon in the same category. He has also drawn from mystical literature of other traditions, which gives him a glimpse of a world beyond this one and strengthens his faith that such a world exists, without his following those traditions. Anything that moves him toward faith in the transcendent is welcome on that footing. Salvation, he said, has to be simple; if it required a degree from a Bible institute, something would be wrong with it. The core package Susan described is sufficient. Further study of the prophets, the law, or the proverbs can help one believe and live better, but it is not part of the minimum.

Charlie added, in Leonard’s defense, that a person raised in that tradition cannot easily separate what came from the Bible from what came from the Book of Mormon; he and his wife still ask each other which source a given idea is from. He does not believe the Book of Mormon is historical and thinks the founder or someone near him composed it, but he finds much truth in it and objects to a few specific errors. Thomas took those errors as the indicator that the book is secondary rather than primary literature: the parts identified as wrong are excluded from the canon, and the rest, being elaboration of events no one present witnessed, is accepted only on someone else’s authority.

Susan raised the test the Bible itself gives: when a messenger claims to speak for God, the hearer is to apply the tests Scripture provides, because accepting something untrue plants a kernel of deception in the heart. She then noticed a difficulty with her own advice: little is known about the authors of many biblical books, so it is not clear how to apply the messenger test to them. She left the difficulty unresolved. Thomas said this returns to the question Charlie has repeatedly asked: what truth is and how it is determined when one did not witness it, and that the question is not trivial.

6. Depth perception

Susan offered an illustration for the problem of conflicting interpretations. Charlie had been treated for a visual condition in which, because his eyes were not aligned, his brain suppressed the input from one eye without his knowing it. He saw with both eyes open but received only one image and had no depth perception. Vision therapy briefly broke the suppression, allowing both eyes to register, and exercises then worked on alignment. She applies this to Bible reading. Many passages appear to contradict one another, and reconciling them takes real work. What people tend to do instead is grasp the verses they feel deeply about and suppress, without realizing it, the verses that don’t fit, so they cannot see them at all. If one looks at both sets and asks God what is true, she believes he can give depth perception, so that verses which seemed to contradict can both be seen as true under some condition. She has not reconciled every passage but has reconciled some in this way, and regards it as a process that may last a lifetime.

7. Closing

Susan’s closing prayer asked that everyone present continue to have something to contribute, and that the two participants for whom she had written the testimony be drawn to seek God deeply. Thomas noted that having a member other than himself write the essay had worked well and that the load should be shared. Charlie was asked to propose a topic for the following week, and Susan was asked to write, at a later date, an account of her reading of the patterns among Ephraim and Manasseh, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, and Cain and Abel, which Thomas has not encountered elsewhere and which fits his understanding that God speaks in metaphors, case studies, and shadows.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38

260903 – The Christos Life Seminar

by Thomas Abshier | Sep 4, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Life Seminar

Concept, content, format, and the open questions

Source: conversation with Isak Gutierrez, 3 September 2026

1. Origin

The Life Seminar is modeled after the EST (Erhard Seminar Training)—the Werner Erhard seminars —which Thomas attended in Los Angeles in 1981 with roughly 300 people in the room. The format was four days, fifteen hours a day, in-room, and immersive. Erhard later divorced, closed EST to avoid royalty obligations, and reopened it as Landmark with similar content under a different name.

The teaching opened with a single assertion — what is, is — and Erhard would find someone in the room to argue with about it. Thomas remembers the man behind him going back and forth over it at length. By the end, people said they got it, though what exactly they got was never clear.

Even though the “it” was unclear, Thomas did get two things. It impressed him with a wider view of life. The side effect was to gradually evolve out of 3HO, the Sikh Dharma. Pamela Dyson (Premka Kaur) later testified in her book “White Bird in a Golden Cage” that the teacher was not living up to the life he taught.

What was wrong with EST was its content: It was basically a New Age, Hindu, Buddhist worldview. Its follow-on seminars taught an amoral sexuality. Structurally, the purpose of an EST seminar was to recruit people into more EST.

The proposal is to keep the format’s power and replace both. Same immersive scope; content that is actually true; and a purpose that sends people out to lead their own groups rather than back into the funnel.

2. Purpose

The stated aim borrows est’s phrase and grounds it differently: a world that works for everyone and everything, with no one and no thing left out — reached not as a social program but as a byproduct.

“We’re creating a world where we’re giving God a good experience of the creation, and the byproduct of giving God a good experience is that we have a good experience — because what God wants is good.”

The replication model: everyone who completes it can become a group leader, with the full script, lead their own Sunday-morning fellowship, and teach others to reframe the Gospel, the Bible, Salvation, and life in a new way without changing the message, merely understanding it more deeply, and making the theory easy to understand.

3. The Content Spine

The interconnection argument, grounded in physics

Everything you do affects everyone, and the CPP framework makes this mechanical, not mystical. If you are in the field, you receive; having received, you respond back to the sender. Being influenced by your environment is not optional — it is impossible not to be.

Consider a thought experiment: you are alone in an ocean of blackness, speaking, and nothing returns. What is the point? Now one other person appears. Your speech changes immediately — there is something to attend to, and a response to anticipate. Now extend it: people listening on the moon. You cannot see them and cannot know how they react, but you know they are there, so you do your best work. The presence alone changes the performance.

The conclusion: “I’m part of a larger system. I’m not an island. There is no such thing as an island.” You cannot pass the homeless man on the street with a sign and give him a dollar, or not give him a dollar, without an effect either way.

One precision worth building into the teaching. Isak raised the popular misreading — particles behave differently when observed, therefore particles are conscious. His own verdict: that is the mythological version, chariots pulling the sun. Thomas’s correction is the right one: collapse requires a detector inside the interacting field, not a spectator. Being watched genuinely does change human behavior, but through nervous systems and feedback, not through the quantum mechanism. Teaching the distinction sharply is worth more than borrowing the confusion, because the audience most drawn to this material is the audience most likely to already hold the confused version.

The play

We are in a play. God made us and wants to be entertained. Loving God and loving our neighbors resolves to putting on a good play for each other, which is the same thing as putting on a good play for God.

The performance has to be method acting — fully in the role, generated in the moment for what is actually right for that person then. A formula will not do it. And full commitment to the role requires forgetting, most of the time, that it is a role.

So why learn that it is a play at all? “That’s just to get the reality of the situation.” Knowing the frame is what lets you orient when you do not know what to do — go back to ground zero, re-establish the frame, then act.

Thomas’s own application, offered as the worked example: doctoring never felt like the thing he was finally for. It was a hard role he had to play for a while, and he played it, and people seemed to think he played it well. But it felt like preparation. “I feel like this is what I’m born to do. I’m doing it now.” Which is more encouraging and also higher stakes — no longer training, now showtime.

The Bible as a book of memes

Isak’s phrase for Thomas’s concept, and it should be kept because it is the most transmissible thing in the conversation.

The Bible functions as a library of shorthands, one for nearly every situation. Facing taxes under a government you consider abusive? Render unto Caesar. The phrase resolves the question in three words and saves you from making your whole life about the fight. The more of them you carry, the more situations you can recognize on sight.

Isak extended it usefully: once you know enough of them, you can look at a new situation and say — I know what is driving this part, I do not know what is driving that part, but that part resembles this other one, and I know the vibe of that one. “The vibe of this one is love, not hatred, so the other one is going to be similar.”

Theorem-proving for life

This is the method section, and Thomas is right that it is essential — it is what makes the seminar teach a capability rather than a catalog.

When you meet a situation you have never been in: what is this similar to? Nothing exactly. Then what several things, combined, is it similar to? Put them together and derive the response.

This is the same operation as CPP. Several axioms, combined: if this and this and this, then that. “You’re doing theorem proving.” The seminar has to teach the derivation method explicitly, or attendees leave with sixty answers and no way to handle the sixty-first situation.

The archetype catalog

Tarot as a taxonomy — major and minor arcana as a structured inventory of human character types, life situations, and polarities. Explicitly not divination. The purpose is coverage: “If you don’t understand all the spectrum of life, when somebody comes along with one that you’re not familiar with, you’re going to be clueless how to deal with that.”

Each card is a way people can act, paired with the question: how do you respond to a person who acts like that? And the polarity: how do you respond to its opposite?

Thomas’s framing on the obvious objection: embedding the archetypes is not worshipping other gods. It is learning the colors.

Comparative religion

Go through each tradition and acknowledge the good in it — Buddhism, Kabbalah, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, New Age, and the secular frames alongside them. His image: every one of them puts something good on the table, usually with a fly in the birthday cake. Take the cake, leave the fly.

The four yogas get particular attention:

• Jnana — arriving at oneness through understanding. This is what CPP is, and it is the path Thomas actually walked: atoms → subatomic particles → conscious points → the mind of God. He can make that traversal in a moment and reframe anything.
• Karma — recognizing your actions return to you, so you clean up what you affected.
• Seva / service — emptying yourself of your own needs, through which the oneness becomes visible.
• Bhakti — complete devotion to the teacher, who sees what you need. This is the abuse vector, and it gets its own treatment below.

The correction to oneness

The pivot on which the whole thing turns, and the place where Thomas departs from every tradition he is surveying:

“Recognizing that we’re all one is actually kind of not really it. It seems like it, but it’s not. It’s recognizing that we’re all one and we’re in relationship.”

Oneness as a terminus is the Buddhist and New Age endpoint. Oneness plus relationship is the Christian one, and it is what makes the rest of the content — the play, the moral character of God, the reason for the creation — coherent rather than decorative.

Why there is a creation at all

Thomas’s cosmology, offered as the spine of the theological section:

God from nothing. Alone, the options are boring or lonely — the scenery never changes. So: make something that generates scenery you did not create, so that something genuinely new and unpredictable exists. Unexpected is interesting; another day of black is not.

But creating conscious beings means feeling what they feel, and what they do to each other is unbearable to feel. Hence the veil — a wall so that God does not have to be inside all of it. And hence the incarnation: going down and living inside one of them, doing it perfectly, dying inside it, and overcoming it establishes a permanence about the purification, and defines who can be let through.

On the obvious objection — you are anthropomorphizing — Thomas’s answer is direct: “Yeah, we are. But what else are you going to do? What is God going to feel other than what you feel, if you are actually part of God?”

Discernment, and the moral character of God

Nothing in the physical world is just good. A table is a table. But two people mating is a honeymoon or a rape, and you cannot tell from the act — you need the whole story. The sequence matters: the nouns come first, then the verb, and only after enough of the character is visible do the adjective and adverb attach.

Then the hardest question: how did God arrive at what is good?

Thomas’s position is that it was evolved rather than declared — that through repeated creation and repeatedly feeling what happened inside it, a moral character coalesced. “I like that feeling. I don’t like that feeling.” And the reason it coalesced on love and sacrifice is structural: everything black returns to black. Dwell on it and it overtakes and kills the light. So what survives is what does not consume itself.

White light and filters

Seeing everything at once is white. Filters give you blue, gray, green, yellow. We see through a glass darkly — and Thomas’s view is that this is exactly right, not a defect: God does not want us blind, and does not want us seeing all of it at once.

The training goal follows: learn to see the colors. The polarities of psychology, philosophy, the stages of life, the characters people play. Then develop the skill of knowing which one you are actually dealing with right now.

Demonology

Real, in Thomas’s assessment, and the challenge is to have it be real without letting it possess you. Ignoring it does not make it less real.

But the manifestations are blunt — moving objects, noises, grabbing, apparitions. “Those are good tricks. They’re great tricks. But it isn’t life.” Or in Erhard’s phrase, which Thomas borrows: so what else you got?

The genuine danger is not the tricks. It is that archetypes can organize into animated principalities and acquire real power. Embedding them consciously, as understood categories, is the protection.

4. Isak’s Contributions

Two belong in the material.

The antenna experience. Sitting quietly in the backyard, not praying, just listening, and a sensation arrived: not I am God, but I am God’s sensor in this particular location. Everything he was absorbing was going somewhere beyond him, through him — “like a glass that light shines through.” It did not feel frightening, and it did not feel like a manufactured thought.

Thomas paired it with a story he has carried for years — a girlfriend, Trudy, standing at a window when something arrived unbidden and she dissolved into recognizing that the window, the outside, the inside, herself, and the mind perceiving it were literally one. He has never had that experience; he can reach its edge through the CPP derivation.

He proposed naming them: the Trudy experience and the Isak experience. Both are worth keeping as teaching material — they are two different shapes of the same recognition, one arriving as dissolution and one as transmission, and having both keeps the seminar from implying there is only one valid form.

And Isak’s frame on comparative religion, which is a better statement of the survey section’s purpose than anything else in the conversation:

“Maybe not all paths lead up the mountain. But if they don’t, there’s at least stuff to learn from every one — even if it’s a negative thing you’re learning. You were in a cult, and you learn how people take advantage of people.”

His daily-practice question also belongs: what does God want to experience today? Sometimes it is being pulled toward a person you have no inclination to talk to. Sometimes it is just the work — and the payoff is not immediate. Sometimes you make a good product and someone hears it years down the road. The Hung Sung-in-Taiwan chain, running on a decade-long delay.

5. Format and Scale

Content: roughly 60 topics, one hour each.

The range Thomas named: Buddhism, Kabbalah, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam; Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche; history and the Napoleonic wars; the Greek gods; tarot; proofs and derivation method; Conscious Point Physics; psychology; and the life domains — gambling, drug use, dating, marriage, child rearing, business relationships, going to parties. Plus the hard cases: what it is to be debilitated, in a coma for life, dying of cancer, and how that fits the big picture.

Delivery: deliberately informal, in explicit contrast to est’s rigidity. Come and go. Coffee in the lounge. A cry room for babies rather than a rule about them.

Funding: the Hyperphysics Institute is a ministry, so donations are tax-deductible. Free to attend, pay if you want. Hall rental runs a few thousand dollars — affordable at low frequency.

First venue: Bakersfield, with friends as the first audience.

Production sequence Thomas proposed: write the book → record the whole thing to teleprompter → build a slide deck → run it live.

His reasoning on the last two: the deck works well for him as a prompt — oh, we talk about that next. Isak’s parallel from playing music in church: write the first word of each line down your arm, and “as soon as I start saying it, my body remembers how to say it.”

The counterweight Thomas himself named: the live version lets you play off the room. The teleprompter is the man on the moon.

6. Isak’s Evaluation

He was asked directly and gave a substantive answer. The sharpest part deserves a real response rather than a dismissal.

On the fifteen-hour format

“I don’t know if the indoctrination for a long period of time like that is required for something that is true. I can imagine it for something that is missing the mark… If I needed 15 hours a day to tell somebody something, it would probably be because I’m trying to give them propaganda and convince them of something that is not inherently true.”

He characterized what happens by hour fourteen as closer to submission than immersion — “by the end of it they’re saying okay, I get it, whatever it is that they get.”

This is the strongest critique in the conversation and it has evidence behind it from Thomas’s own account. Thomas says he did not get it in the seminar, that most of it made no sense, and that his current reading of what EST was teaching came together later, on reflection. If the format transmitted content efficiently, that is not what the experience would have looked like. What the format may actually have done is disrupt an existing commitment — which is real and valuable, and is a different mechanism from teaching.

Thomas’s own reply — “we’re not trying to snow anybody, we’re trying to actually bring them along” — is the right intent. The question Isak is raising is whether the format serves that intent or works against it.

His proposed sequence

Book → one- to two-hour episodes per subject, online → if those gain traction, live events for people who have already opted in.

The advantage is real: the audience self-selects, arrives already interested, and the live event becomes a gathering of people who chose it rather than an endurance test for people who bought a ticket.

On the cult problem

His recommendation is to put it on the table explicitly and early:

“If this sounds a little too culty — this is a direct response to cults, and a direct response to other spirituality that is unclear. If this sounds too culty, then just check out our book, check out our online video. If any of it makes sense, then buy a ticket or come free.”

Thomas’s response was that he is not concerned, because it is not a cult.

That answer is true and it is not sufficient. The structural features are the ones that matter to an outside observer: an immersive multi-day format, a lineage descended from est, a founder-teacher, and a replication model where graduates start their own groups. Each is defensible. Together they pattern-match, and asserting otherwise does not unmatch them.

The good news is that the seminar’s own content contains the antidote. The Bhakti-yoga section — complete devotion to a teacher who claims to see what you need, and the abuse that structure enabled in Thomas’s own lineage — is the most effective inoculation available, and it is already in the curriculum. It should come early rather than being buried in the survey, and the design principles should be stated as commitments rather than left as dispositions: no devotion to the teacher, materials freely available, come-and-go attendance, no escalating commitment ladder, no financial gate.

On distribution

People get their information from the internet. There are TikTok and YouTube channels dedicated to spirituality that do well, including with viewers who are not themselves spiritual, because the format conveys authority and interest. Views compound.

On leading with physics

Do not. “You’re going to put people to sleep, and then they’re going to sleep for ten hours.” Not a comment on the theory — a comment on physics generally and on what a brain absorbs cold.

His better frame: the spiritual version of the Hyperphysics book. Physics included, not as the opener.

Reading-time calibration

Worth carrying beyond this project. A 5,000-word essay takes Thomas thirty to sixty minutes to write. It takes Isak two to three hours to absorb, because it is not coming from his own source — he reads, sits, lets it process, reads more. That ratio applies to everything Renaissance Ministries publishes and is useful for calibrating what to expect of readers.

7. Assessment

The strongest asset is the sixty-topic taxonomy itself, and it is worth more than the format question. It is a structured map of the domains a person actually has to navigate, and it can be built incrementally. Each hour is an essay. Thomas already writes 5,000-word essays regularly and Renaissance Ministries already publishes weekly. In book form, the seminar is roughly a year of the work already underway, organized.

The distinctive contribution is the CPP-as-jnana-yoga link. Nobody else can derive oneness from a worked physics theory and then use the derivation as a devotional on-ramp. Every other comparative-religion survey has to arrive at oneness by assertion or by wax-on-wax-off. This one can arrive by proof. That is the genuine differentiator — and Isak is right that it cannot be the opening.

Isak’s sequencing is better than the seminar-first version, for a reason beyond audience-building: writing sixty hours of content forces the taxonomy to be tested. Topics that cannot sustain an essay probably cannot sustain an hour in a room, and finding that out on paper costs nothing.

On Thomas’s worry — that by the time he is ready to present it, it will look trivial and people will be bored — Isak’s answer is the right one and applies to every art form. What is trivial to the person who worked it out is frequently novel to everyone else. That is not a reason to skip the editing; it is a reason not to trust that particular feeling.

The thing to protect: Isak’s line about the mirror. Sixty subjects means a reader finds not only the phase of life they are in, but the one that comes next. That is the actual product, and it is a better description of the value than “seminar” or “book.”

8. Next Steps

Compiled from the conversation of 3 September 2026 between Thomas Abshier and Isak Gutierrez.

260831 – Test of Salvation

by Thomas Abshier | Aug 31, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Seven Tests and the Verse That Was Left Out

On Self-Examination, the Witness of the Spirit, and Where Assurance Actually Rests

Fellowship Discussion Essay | August 31, 2026

Occasion. A piece came through the MSN feed this week under the headline 7 Ways the Bible Says to Test Whether You’re Truly Saved. It is a slideshow listicle — seven numbered panels, each with a stock image, a paragraph of warm explanatory prose, and a pull-quoted verse. The originating publisher is Oldest.org, a general-interest site whose ordinary catalog runs to oldest-cities and oldest-artifacts material; the piece is syndicated to MSN under their arrangement, and no author byline was recoverable from either page. Readers who want to judge my characterization can find it at oldest.org.

In May, we took up an MSN-syndicated article on why God did not forgive the fallen angels and found it thin, redundant, and unsourced, missing the Christological hinge—Hebrews 2:16—that the classical tradition treats as the actual answer to its own question. This piece is not that. Its seven items are drawn from the Johannine letters and, item by item, continue what the letters say. Its framing paragraph explicitly disclaims the aim of leaving readers in what it calls agonizing paranoia, and says the apostles did not intend that either.

But the piece errs by omission. The First Epistle of John contains the seven kinds of evidence the article lists. It also contains two provisions the article does not list — the witness of the Spirit, and the explicit instruction about what to do when your own heart returns a guilty verdict. Take the seven, drop those two, and you have converted a letter written to settle anxious Christians into an instrument that produces anxiety in them. Every item stays orthodox. The pastoral vector reverses.

That reversal is what this essay is about. Along the way I want to do four other things: distinguish the three tenses in which the New Testament uses the word saved, because the article’s question collapses them; show that the seven tests are not seven; run the seven against a case our Lord Himself adjudicated, and watch them return the wrong verdict; and put the ontological floor under the whole discussion, because the question how do I know I have been changed? has an answer at the level of what reality is made of, and that answer is better than any checklist.

I. What the piece gets right

The genre of self-examination is biblical, not evangelical invention. John says plainly why he wrote: These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life (1 John 5:13). He does supply tests. Paul commands the exercise directly: Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves (2 Corinthians 13:5). Peter says give diligence to make your calling and election sure (2 Peter 1:10). A Christian who has never asked the question has not been paying attention to his Bible. The article is not importing a foreign practice.

The particular seven are drawn from the right places. The light/darkness contrast (1 John 1:5-7), the treatment of confessed sin (1:8-10), obedience as the sign of knowing Him (2:3-4), love of the brethren as the passage from death to life (3:14, with John 13:35), appetite for the word (1 Peter 2:2), the incarnational confession (1 John 4:2), and endurance (Hebrews 3:14 with 1 John 2:19) — six of these seven come from one short letter, and the seventh is its natural companion. The article did not invent its list; it read it off the page.

Two of the items are better than average. The second item’s distinction — that the difference between the converted and the unconverted is not the absence of sin but what happens in the hour after the sin — is exactly the distinction Paul draws between godly sorrow and the sorrow of the world: For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death (2 Corinthians 7:10). Godly sorrow grieves an offense against a Person; worldly sorrow grieves a consequence to oneself. The article’s language of having wounded a valued relationship rather than broken an arbitrary rule reaches that distinction in ordinary English, and I would be glad to hear it said that well from most pulpits. Its wordplay — that salvation does not make you sinless but does make you sin less — is genuinely good, and true.

The sixth item is likewise right where it matters most: a sincere faith in a Jesus who has been edited cannot save, because the saving is done by the Jesus who is, not by the sincerity of the believer. I will develop that below, because it is the item where the article’s instinct is correct and its reasoning stops one level short.

So: not a heresy, not a hack job. An orthodox summary of real biblical material, written by someone who appears to want to help. The problem is structural, and structural problems in pastoral writing do more damage than doctrinal ones, because nobody notices them.

II. Definitional precision: saved is three tenses, not one

Before the tests, the term. The article’s title asks whether you are truly saved, and treats that as a single binary fact about you that the seven items will resolve. The New Testament does not use the word that way. It uses it in three tenses, and confusing them is the source of a great deal of unnecessary torment.

Past tense — justification. Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1). For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). This is a completed transaction, effected outside me, at a point in time not my own. Its ground is Christ’s finished work; its instrument is faith; its evidence is not, in the first instance, anything visible in me at all.

Present tense — sanctification. Unto us which are saved it is the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18); the participle is present and continuous — unto us who are being saved. And immediately after the Ephesians passage above: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10). This is a process, underway, uneven, observable.

Future tense — glorification. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him (Romans 5:9). Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed (Romans 13:11). This has not happened yet.

Now look at what the seven items actually measure. Walking in the light, grieving over sin, obeying, loving the brethren, hungering for the word, holding the confession, enduring — every one of these is an observation about the present tense. They are readings taken on sanctification in progress. And the article uses them to adjudicate the past tense: whether the transaction happened.

That is not an illegitimate inference. It is precisely the inference John draws, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Fruit does testify to the root. But it is an inference across a category boundary, and inferences across category boundaries have to be made carefully, with attention to what can go wrong. What can go wrong here is obvious once named: the present tense is variable. It has good weeks and bad ones, seasons of appetite and seasons of dryness, illnesses that flatten affect, griefs that flatten everything. If a variable present-tense reading is the sole instrument for adjudicating a fixed past-tense fact, then the fixed fact will appear to flicker on and off, and the Christian holding the instrument will conclude that his salvation is flickering on and off. It is not. The instrument is.

This is why the older divines insisted on distinguishing the ground of salvation from the evidence of it. The ground is Christ, and it does not move. The evidence is in me, and it does. Confuse the two and every bad month becomes an ontological emergency. The article’s title question — are you truly saved? — is asked about the ground; its seven answers are all readings off the evidence; and nothing in the piece tells the reader that these are two different things.

III. Seven that are three that are one

Now the list itself, and the same structural finding we made in May: the number in the headline is not the number of things being said.

The May piece advertised ten reasons and delivered four. This one advertises seven tests and delivers, on inspection, three — and beneath the three, one.

The three. Since Robert Law’s study of the Johannine letters in 1909, students of 1 John have recognized that the letter runs three tests, stated and restated in a spiral rather than a list. Law called them the tests of righteousness, of love, and of belief. Sort the article’s seven into them and they go without a remainder:

• The moral test — righteousness. Item 1 (walking in the light), item 2 (the reaction to sin), item 3 (obedience). Three panels, one test: does your will bend toward God’s when the two disagree?
• The social test — love. Item 4 (love of the brethren). One panel, one test: do you actually love these particular people?
• The doctrinal test — belief. Item 6 (the incarnational confession). One panel, one test: whom do you actually worship?

Item 5 (appetite for the word) is not a fourth test but a symptom of the first and third together — you feed on what you love and trust. Item 7 (endurance) is not a fourth test but the first three extended along the axis of time. Seven panels, three tests.

The one. And the three are three angles on a single question, which the Grammar states as the fifth of the seven foundational perspectives: love is identity formation; we become what we love. Every one of the three tests is a reading of the direction and object of the heart’s love. The moral test asks what you love enough to obey. The social test asks whom you love enough to serve. The doctrinal test asks whom you love enough to refuse to edit. Augustine put it in four Latin words in the Confessions: pondus meum amor meus — my love is my weight; by it I am carried wherever I am carried. The tests do not measure seven separate performances. They take seven bearings on one trajectory, and the trajectory is set by what the heart has come to love.

This matters practically, and here is why. A list of seven invites arithmetic — five out of seven, four out of seven, a passing grade. One question does not. If the seven are seven, a man can pass most of them and be at peace while his heart is elsewhere; and a woman can fail two on a bad month and conclude she is lost. If the seven are one, the arithmetic disappears and the question becomes the only one that was ever being asked: what does your heart love, and what is it becoming? That question cannot be scored. It can only be answered, in the presence of God, honestly.

IV. The two provisions the article left out

Here is the omission, and it is the center of this essay.

The First Epistle of John gives the seven kinds of evidence the article lists. It also gives two things the article does not mention at all.

The first is the witness of the Spirit. John names it twice, in the two places where he is most explicit about how assurance is actually obtained:

And hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us. — 1 John 3:24

Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit. — 1 John 4:13

Paul says the same thing and locates it more precisely: The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God (Romans 8:16). Note the grammar. It is not that my spirit examines my behavior and infers a conclusion. It is that another Witness testifies alongside my spirit — a second voice in the room, not my own, not produced by my own inference, whose testimony is direct. This is the one item on the whole subject that the believer does not generate, cannot manufacture, and does not score. And it is the only item John explicitly labels as the hereby of abiding, twice.

The article contains no Spirit. Seven panels on how to know you belong to God, and the Third Person of the Trinity — whose declared office in this exact matter is to bear witness — does not appear. That is not a small editorial choice. It leaves the reader with a self-administered behavioral audit and no witness but himself.

The second is the provision for a condemning heart. In the middle of the love test, John does something no listicle would ever do: he anticipates that the test will hurt, and provides for it.

And hereby we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before him. For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God. — 1 John 3:19-21

Read that again, because it is the verse the whole genre leaves out. John has just told his readers to love not in word but in deed and in truth. He knows exactly what will happen next in a sincere reader: the reader will look at his own love, find it thin, and be condemned by his own heart. And John’s response is not then examine yourself further. His response is that God is greater than your heart. Your heart is not the highest court. Its verdict is not final. It knows less than God does, and God — who knows more, including everything your heart is accusing you of and a great deal it has forgotten — is the one whose judgment stands.

That is a provision of extraordinary tenderness, and it exists in the text for one reason: because the tests, honestly applied by a tender conscience, will produce a condemning verdict, and John does not want that verdict to be the last word. He wrote the letter that ye may know (5:13), not that ye may wonder.

Strike those two provisions and what remains is not 1 John. It is 1 John’s evidence section with the object removed and the comforter removed — the confirmatory tier presented as though it were the whole structure. Assurance in the New Testament stands on three legs: the object (Christ and His finished work, which does not move), the witness (the Spirit, given, not achieved), and the fruit (the tests, real but variable). The article gives leg three and calls it the stool.

This is the same species of finding as the May essay, and I want the fellowship to see the pattern. There, the listicle asked why the fallen angels are unforgiven and never reached Hebrews 2:16 — the Incarnation, the actual hinge. Here, the listicle asks how you know you are saved and never reaches 1 John 3:20 and the witness of the Spirit — again, the actual hinge. Twice now the form has delivered a correct periphery around a missing center. That is worth noticing as a habit of the genre rather than an accident of two writers.

V. The practical test: run the seven on Luke 18

Abstractions are cheap. Let us take the article’s seven items, hand them to two men in a case our Lord adjudicated Himself, and see what verdict the instrument returns.

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican (Luke 18:10).

The Pharisee. Item 1, walking in the light: he has separated himself scrupulously from every darkness he can name — extortioners, the unjust, adulterers. Passes. Item 2, attitude toward sin: he hates it, publicly and by name. Passes. Item 3, obedience: I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess — obedience beyond what the law requires. Passes emphatically. Item 5, hunger for the word: he is a Pharisee; the text is his life’s study. Passes. Item 6, doctrine: his theology is the orthodox theology of his day — one God, the resurrection, angels and spirits, the authority of the Scriptures. Passes. Item 7, endurance: he has been at this for decades and shows no sign of quitting. Passes.

Six of seven, several of them emphatically.

The publican. He would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. Ask him about walking in the light and he will tell you he has walked in darkness. Ask about his obedience and he will say he has none worth naming. Ask about his hunger for the word, his record of endurance, his standing among the brethren — he is a tax farmer for the occupying power; the brethren will not stand near him. By self-report he scores approximately zero.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.

The scorecard returned the wrong answer, and the wrongness is not incidental — the parable was told unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others (18:9), which is to say, told against the practice of self-scoring itself. Matthew records the same reversal in still starker terms: Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you (Matthew 7:22-23). Those men had works to show — better works than most of us can produce. What they did not have was the thing no list can measure: they were not known by Him.

Now, the fair objection, and I want to raise it myself rather than let it sit. John’s actual tests do catch the Pharisee. Item 4 — the love test — is the one he fails, and he fails it in the same breath as he passes the others: God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are. He despises his neighbor. And 1 John is merciless on precisely that point: He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now (2:9). So the letter is not defective. Its instrument is self-correcting, because it puts at the center the one test that pride cannot game. A man can counterfeit obedience, appetite, orthodoxy, and endurance. He cannot counterfeit love of the brethren, because contempt leaks.

This is exactly why John’s material must not be flattened into a list of equals. In the letter, love is the center and the others radiate from it. In a seven-panel slideshow, love is item 4 of 7 — one line on a scorecard, worth the same as the others, and easily outvoted by six passes. The flattening is what breaks the instrument. The letter diagnoses the Pharisee; the listicle would have congratulated him.

And the publican? He would have read the article, scored zero, and gone away worse. That is the second half of the damage, and it is the half I care most about pastorally, because in twenty-five years of practice the people I have seen tormented by this question are almost never the ones who should be.

VI. An etymological pause: two Greek words for test

The New Testament has two verbs where our English has one, and the difference is the whole difference between what Paul commands and what the genre performs.

δοκιμάζω (dokimazō) is the assayer’s word. It is what you do to metal to establish that it is genuine — heat it, test it, and approve it. Its result-noun dokimē is provenness, tested character; its adjective dokimos means approved, having passed. The whole orientation of the word is toward vindication. You assay silver because you expect silver.

πειράζω (peirazō) is the other word. It also means to test, but its trajectory bends the other way — toward trying, tempting, testing in order to find the breaking point. It is the word used of the devil in the wilderness.

Now read Paul’s command in the Greek: πειράζετε ἑαυτούς, εἰ ἐστὲ ἐν τῇ πίστει· ἑαυτοὺς δοκιμάζετε — examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves (2 Corinthians 13:5). Both verbs, in that order: probe, then assay. And Paul finishes the sentence by telling the Corinthians what result he expects: Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates? The word rendered reprobates is ἀδόκιμοι — failed the assay, rejected metal. Paul’s expectation is the negative of the negative. He expects them to find Christ in them. The examination is meant to terminate in a recognition, not in a score.

Set that beside the listicle’s form. A slideshow whose headline asks whether you are truly saved, whose panels advance one at a time, and whose revenue depends on your continuing to click, is applying peirazō energy to a dokimazō task. It probes; it does not assay. It is structurally incapable of the concluding move — know ye not your own selves, that Jesus Christ is in you — because that move ends the session, and ending the session is the one thing the form cannot afford.

VII. The genre finding, advanced

In May I argued that the SEO listicle cannot do theology because it cannot cite, cannot sustain a paragraph, and must pad three or four ideas out to a round headline number. I will not re-argue that; it is in the archive and it stands. But this piece adds a finding the earlier one did not surface, and I think it is the more important of the two.

The form has a pastoral vector, and the click economy sets it toward anxiety.

Consider the incentives honestly, without accusing anyone of bad faith. A headline that asks are you truly saved? outperforms a headline that says you may rest in Christ, because unresolved threat holds attention and resolution releases it. A seven-panel slideshow monetizes the interval between panel one and panel seven; anything that resolves the reader’s disquiet on panel two destroys the remaining six panels’ value. Nothing in this requires the writer to intend harm. It requires only that pieces which relieve anxiety quickly get fewer clicks than pieces which sustain it, and that over thousands of iterations the surviving pieces are the ones that sustain it. That is selection, not malice, and it operates on Christian content exactly as it operates on health scares and financial warnings.

So the genre, applied to the doctrine of assurance, will reliably produce a version of 1 John with the comfort removed — not because the writer removed it, but because the versions with the comfort intact did not propagate. That is the structural reason the two provisions in §IV are missing. They are the two provisions that would have ended the reader’s disquiet, and the form selects against ending the reader’s disquiet.

The fellowship’s discipline follows from this directly, and it is a reading discipline, not a boycott. When a piece of religious content reaches you through an algorithmic feed, ask not only is this true? but what is this shaped to do to me? Truth-by-item and effect-by-form are two different audits, and an orthodox piece can fail the second while passing the first. This one does.

VIII. The doctrine test, at the level below it

The sixth item is right that a modified Jesus cannot save, and its instinct — that we do not get to edit Him to fit the moment’s convictions — is sound. But the article gives the reason as sincerity being insufficient, and stops. There is a level underneath that, and it is the level where the claim becomes unanswerable rather than merely asserted.

Every serious religious system faces the same structural problem: there is a moral debt, and something has to be done with it. What distinguishes the systems is not their ethics, which overlap far more than partisans admit, but what each one does with the debt.

• Islam hopes that mercy will outweigh it, with the scales unrevealed until the day.
• Buddhism exits the system in which debts are contracted at all.
• Hinduism amortizes it across lifetimes, with no principle by which the ledger ever closes.
• Secular humanism denies that the debt was ever incurred.
• Christianity alone says that the debt is real, is paid in full, and is paid by the Creditor at His own cost.

Now put the edited Jesuses into that frame. The Jesus who is a good moral teacher is not a diminished Christianity; he is the humanist answer wearing Christian vocabulary — a Jesus who instructs about the debt rather than discharging it. The Jesus who is a life coach is the therapeutic answer in the same costume. These are not smaller versions of the Christian solution. They are structurally other solutions, and they solve nothing, because instruction and encouragement do not retire a debt.

This is why John’s test is worded the way it is. Not does this spirit speak well of Jesus but: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God (1 John 4:2). The load is on come in the flesh. The confession that saves is a confession about the Incarnation, because the Incarnation is the mechanism — God taking on the nature of the debtor in order to pay in that nature. Which is exactly where the May essay landed from the opposite direction: he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham (Hebrews 2:16). Two listicles, two missing centers, and the missing center is the same one both times. It is always the Incarnation. That is not a coincidence about listicles; it is a fact about the gospel, which has one hinge, and about every substitute for it, which has none.

The pastoral form of the sixth test is therefore not have you screened your Christology for errors? It is: when you pray, who is at the other end? If it is the Christ who became flesh, died as a substitute, and rose bodily, you are praying to the One who is there. The test is about the object, not about the quality of your grip on it — which is the mercy in it, because grips vary and objects do not.

IX. The endurance test: where the tradition is firm, and where it is not

The seventh item asserts that real faith lasts, citing For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end (Hebrews 3:14) and They went out from us, but they were not of us (1 John 2:19). The fellowship should know which part of this is settled across the Christian traditions and which part has been contested for five centuries, because the article presents the whole of it as flat fact.

Firm, and held by every branch: final salvation belongs to those who endure. No tradition teaches that a man may abandon Christ finally and be saved anyway. He that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved (Matthew 24:13) is not a Protestant verse or a Catholic verse; it is in everyone’s Bible, and everyone means it.

Contested, and honestly so: what the failure to endure proves. The Reformed reading takes 1 John 2:19 as the interpretive key — those who leave were never regenerate, and the elect are preserved. The Arminian and Wesleyan reading takes the Hebrews warning passages as the key — it is impossible… if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance (Hebrews 6:4-6) presupposes that the fall is a real possibility for real partakers. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions hold something closer to the second, with mortal sin severing the life of grace and the sacraments restoring it. These are not careless readings; each is doing justice to texts the others find difficult, and each has to work to accommodate the other’s proof texts.

I hold the Johannine reading, and I will say why in a sentence: 2:19 is John’s own explanation of the phenomenon under discussion, offered in the letter that also supplies the tests, and I take an author’s explanation of his own case as weightier than an inference from a warning addressed to a different situation. But I state it as a position among positions, and I note the thing that matters more than the adjudication: the pastoral upshot is identical in every tradition. Continue. Hold fast. No branch of the church has ever told a worried Christian that the answer to his worry is to stop. The warning passages and the preservation passages both terminate in the same imperative, which is why Paul can put both halves in consecutive sentences without embarrassment: work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure (Philippians 2:12-13). Work, because it is real work; and the working is His.

And on the other side of the same tension: Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6). The beginning was not yours; neither is the finishing. That is the sentence to set beside the seventh item, and the article does not have it.

X. The floor: what a changed heart is, ontologically

Now the level the article cannot reach, and where the fellowship’s own framework does its work.

The whole discussion of assurance presupposes an answer to a prior question: what is it that changed, when a person is converted? If salvation is only a change of legal status recorded elsewhere, then self-examination is the only access I have to it, and the article’s method is the only method available — inspect the behavior, infer the status. But that is not what the framework holds, and it is not what Scripture describes.

Reality, on the Conscious Point account, is constituted by conscious points sustained moment by moment within the divine consciousness. In him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) is not a devotional flourish; it is an ontological description. And the corollary — developed in the June seed entry on borrowed power — is that every creature acts on power that is lent to it, continuously, by the One it is acting toward or against. Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above (John 19:11), said to Pilate at the moment of his maximum apparent authority.

Two consequences follow, and both bear directly on assurance.

First, walking in the light is a description, not a metaphor. Light, in John’s usage, is not a figure for good conduct. God is light, and there is no darkness in Him at all. To walk in the light is to move with the grain of what actually exists; to walk in darkness is to move against the grain of what actually exists, while being sustained in existence, instant by instant, by the very One whose nature is being contradicted. That is the real weight of sin, and it is heavier than rule-breaking: every sin is committed on borrowed power, using the Provider’s continuous provision to do the thing the Provider is not. The first item on the article’s list, properly grounded, is not a lifestyle question. It is a question about which way you are facing in a universe that has a direction.

Second — and this is the pastoral payoff — a new love is not the kind of thing a creature can manufacture. The creature has no aseity. Nothing in it is self-originating; that is the whole content of derivative existence. So when a man who did not love God finds that he now does — not perfectly, not steadily, but really — he is looking at something that did not come from him, because nothing comes from him. He did not decide to find Christ beautiful and then execute the decision. The affection arrived. We love him, because he first loved us (1 John 4:19).

This reorients the whole examination. The question the article puts to the reader is have you performed sufficiently? — a question about output, asked of a creature with no independent power to produce output, which is why it terminates in either despair or self-deception. The question the framework puts is different and answerable: is there something here that I did not put here? Do I grieve at offending God — an odd grief for an animal to have, and one I did not train into myself? Do I find, in the middle of a bad month with nothing on the scorecard, that I still want Him? Did I want that ten years ago?

And note what this does with the reader who is most tormented. The anxiety itself is data, and it points the opposite direction from the one the anxious reader assumes. A man does not lie awake grieving that he may not love God unless he already, at some level, does. The indifferent do not agonize about indifference. That is not a proof — I will not hand anyone a formula that makes anxiety itself a sacrament — but it is evidence, and it is evidence of exactly the kind the article’s method cannot see, because its method only reads outputs and this is a reading of direction.

XI. To the two readers

Every piece of writing on this subject is read by two people, and what helps one damages the other. So let me address each.

To the one whose heart condemns him. You have read the seven, you have scored yourself, and you came up short. Hear the verse the article did not print: if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Your heart is a witness, not a judge, and it is a witness with a known bias — it knows your failures in detail and your Savior only by report. God knows both, exhaustively, including the things you have forgotten and the affections you have not noticed you have. His court outranks yours. Take your case there and stop retrying it in the lower one at three in the morning. And notice, please, what your distress is made of: it is grief at the possibility of being separated from Him. That grief is not the disease. Turn from what you know to be wrong, put your eyes back on the object — the Christ who came in the flesh and finished the work — and let the fruit be what it will be. It is His to grow.

To the one who read the seven and was comfortable. The Pharisee scored six. Six is available to anyone with discipline and a good memory for verses, and it is the score most compatible with never having been changed at all, because the six can all be performed and the seventh cannot. So take the one test that pride cannot counterfeit: not do I love humanity, but do I love these people — the ones in the fellowship who irritate me, the ones whose politics are wrong, the ones who need something from me this week. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another (John 13:35). If that one is thin, no arithmetic on the other six will help you, and the honest thing to do is to say so to God tonight rather than to reason about it.

For myself, I will say plainly where I stand, because I do not think a man should write about assurance from behind a screen. My assurance does not rest on my performance on any list, and it had better not, because I have had months that would fail the audit. It rests on three things, in this order: on Christ, who came in the flesh and finished the work, and who has not moved; on the Spirit He gave, whose testimony alongside my spirit is not something I manufactured and not something I can argue myself out of; and, third and last, on the fruit — the fact that over decades the direction has held, that I still want Him on the days I have nothing to show, and that the wanting was never mine to begin with. That is the order. Reverse it and you get a religion of anxiety with Christian vocabulary. Keep it and the tests do exactly what John meant them to do: not to put you on trial, but to confirm what the Spirit is already telling you.

Seven tests, three tests, one question. And underneath the question, a Person who is greater than your heart and knows all things.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.

— Jude 24-25

— Thomas

References

• 7 Ways the Bible Says to Test Whether You’re Truly Saved. Oldest.org, no byline; syndicated to MSN.com. https://www.oldest.org/religion/test-whether-youre-truly-saved/
• Robert Law, The Tests of Life: A Study of the First Epistle of St. John. T. & T. Clark, 1909. (Public domain; the three-test structural reading of 1 John used in §III.)
• Augustine, Confessions XIII.9 — pondus meum amor meus.
• Renaissance Ministries, Hebrews 2:16, the Fallen Angels, and the Question the Listicle Could Not Reach (CFE, May 25, 2026) — the prior listicle engagement and the incarnational hinge referenced in §§IV and VIII.
• Renaissance Ministries, Why Jews Don’t Accept Jesus as Messiah (CFE, May 30, 2026) — the parallel finding on pop-format religious content.
• Renaissance Ministries, The Law Beneath the Mercy Seat (CFE, May 8, 2026) — grace and obedience held together; background to §II.
• Renaissance Ministries, The Architecture of Mercy (CFE, July 10, 2026) — the atonement structure assumed in §VIII.
• Renaissance Ministries, All Power Is Borrowed: Derivative Existence and the Conservation of the Soul (Founders Vision seed, June 7, 2026) — the ontological floor developed in §X.
• Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38